The Washington Capitals dropped their first meeting of the season with the Pittsburgh Penguins by a score of 4-3. The annoying bird team with ugly colors is creeping closer to the Caps division lead.

The Pens out-shot the Caps 33 to 32, but were out-attempted at five-on-five 60 to 26.

• Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The Caps thoroughly dominated puck possession overall at five-on-five (plus-34 shot attempt differential), but the Pens capitalized more on rush chances and scrappy play in front of the net to take the win. I’m very glad 2018 happened or I would probably have gone insane by this point.
• Sidney Crosby is still a giant, annoying crybaby. I feel very privileged to not be a Pens fan and have to pretend to like him. I wonder how much it pains them that the rest of the world likes Alex Ovechkin so much more. Dude’s one of the best ever at hockey though and the Caps shut his line down masterfully at even strength. The Pens with Sid out there at five-on-five held a minus-nine shot attempt differential, minus-six scoring chance differential, and a minus-one high danger chance differential.
• I don’t have words for how confused I am at the proposed coaching solution to the recent power play ineptness. They moved Ovi to the right side because that’s the only part of the power play that works at all and just wanted the whole thing to be a complete mess? You need your extra man unit to be great in “big” games, which we saw not happen in last year’s first round exit as well. Just saying.

Dmitry Orlov is playing in his 500th career and his 399th consecutive game today. Only two other players, a former teammate of Orlov's and a current teammate, have played in more consecutive games with one team within their first 500 games. pic.twitter.com/BYkqLr7rWJ

— CapitalsPR (@CapitalsPR) February 2, 2020

• Even with my beleaguering of the power play, I think the Caps had a great shot at winning this game if it were not for Matt Murray out-dueling Ilya Samsonov. Murray being actually good would mean bad things for the rest of the Eastern Conference.
• Lars Eller was pretty fantastic. Lars always seems to step his game up against the Pens. He now has 13 goals on the season and his two in this game gave him his first multi goal effort of the campaign.

Numbers thanks to Hockey-reference.com and NaturalStatTrick.com.

Full RMNB Coverage of Caps vs Penguins

Headline photo: NBC Sports Washington