The Washington Capitals returned from a week-long break that felt infinitely longer and at times they sure looked like quite the rusty bunch. They dropped their return game with their full lineup back to the Pittsburgh Penguins by a score of 6-3.

The Pens outshot the Caps 38 to 31 but were out-attempted five-on-five 43 to 42.

• A tale as old as time. The Caps outplayed the Pens at five-on-five and yet still lost. I almost just want them to stink up the joint against the Pens because they tend to somehow pull out those games more often. They almost doubled up the Pens in high danger chances at five-on-five but still only led for about five minutes in this game.
• One of the reasons for that and for this recent losing streak is that the Caps goaltending has gone ice cold. Vitek Vanecek was slated as the Caps third-string netminder this offseason and has been forced into making ten straight starts in a very tough division to kick off his NHL career. Vitek got beat four times on 36 shots in this one for a sub-.890 save percentage. Ilya Samsonov meanwhile made a “rehab” start of sorts with the Hershey Bears in the AHL and gave up five goals against in an overtime loss. Hoo-boy.
• I obviously won’t pin a single moment in this game as causing the loss overall but man the offensive zone penalty by Nic Dowd that led to a Pens power play to make the game 3-2 sure felt like a backbreaker. As far as you can possibly get from your own net and that’s the result? Yikes. We’ve gotten fed that same scenario about 6,687 too many times the past couple of seasons.

Nicklas Backstrom has recorded 18 points (7g, 11a) in 13 games this season and ranks tied for fifth in the NHL in scoring. It marks his second-best 13 game start to a season in his career (5g, 14a in 2011-12).

— CapitalsPR (@CapitalsPR) February 14, 2021

• One major positive that I got. Evgeny Kuznetsov was easily the Caps best forward at even strength for me. I thought Kuzy was engaged all game and he got on the board with his second goal of the season and he now has four points in three games against the Pens this season.
• The Dowd line seemingly ain’t working anymore but they’re probably going to get much easier assignments from here on out (crossing my fingers) so they cant have complete stinker games like this one. With them on the ice five-on-five, the Caps got only 15.4-percent of the shot attempts, a minus-eight shot differential, a minus-five scoring chance differential (they didn’t create a single chance of their own), a minus-two high danger chance differential, and were scored on twice. And that’s only in around six minutes of full ice time together. Bad.
• I thought Conor Sheary had a very nice game. Yep, that’s about all I got for this game. It wasn’t fun.

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

RMNB Coverage of Caps at Penguins

Screenshot courtesy of NBC