The Washington Capitals lit up the scoreboard against the Colorado Avalanche to secure their second victory of the season. They close out the homestand 2-0-1 after the 6-3 victory.
This is a story about how mobile defensemen with puck skills make your modern National Hockey League team better.
- The Capitals ran the Avalanche off the race track in the first period and didn’t really look back from there. In the first twenty minutes at five-on-five the Caps out-attempted the Avs 25 to eight, octupled them up in scoring chances 16 to two, and recorded nine high danger chances to their zero. There were some bumps in the road after the first but they were very short and sporadic stretches of play. Overall, this was a great win against a very good team.
- I don’t think you’d have a tough time arguing that Martin Fehervary and Trevor van Riemsdyk have been the best Capitals defensemen rather easily through three games. What do those two have in common? They were frozen out of the lineup last season by more “physical”, larger, less-skilled defensemen like Zdeno Chara and Brenden Dillon. I’ll have more on Fehervary in the next bullet but just know that the Caps are positively tilting the ice with TVR out there five-on-five right now. We’re talking 64.3-percent of the shot attempts and 65.2-percent of the scoring chances.
- Fehervary looked very, very good in this game. If I was Craig Laughlin I would be “holding it here” on about six or seven brilliant individual defensive plays that I noticed. He went one-on-one with Nathan Mackinnon more than a few times and really showed off how controlled he is while defending at speed. It’s important to note that he defends with speed a lot but it’s not often rash and he does a lot of crafty, smart, effective stuff that feels a little beyond his years. With his emergence and the play of TVR, it’s allowing Peter Laviolette to have the Dmitry Orlov and Nick Jensen pairing more narrow in on taking the majority of defensive zone shifts (Orlov so far has started a team-low 20-percent of his shifts in the offensive zone). Basically, it means Orlov, who in my opinion is the best overall defender on the team, is not forced to do a little of everything and can be used in more of a pure shutdown role (at least in terms of zone starts) like he was with Matt Niskanen the year the Caps won the Stanley Cup.
- That brings me to the following with a Nick Jensen that may be “unlocked” this season:
Look, I'm just saying. pic.twitter.com/e5uET9GeMK
— Chris Cerullo (@CJC_95) October 20, 2021
- One of the other big stories of this game was obviously Evgeny Kuznetsov. Kuzy was fantastic in all three zones in this singular game but if he can be just “below average” defensively overall this season and often repeat that sort of offensive performance, we’ll be cookin’ with gas, folks. His second goal really brought back memories of 2018 Kuznetsov who was picking corners like that on Marc-Andre Fleury with ease. The Capitals top line of him, Ovechkin, and Wilson are the team’s three leading scorers, combining for 16 points in three games.
- Connor McMichael got his first game of the season and I thought he put in a better performance than Hendrix Lapierre did in his two games. You can tell McMichael’s game is more mature and compact. Where you lose out on a little speed and touch by subbing Lapierre out, you gain more consistency shift-to-shift and poise defensively with McMichael. Similar to Lapierre against Tampa, McMichael skated two minutes less than any other Caps skater (9:45) so it’s clear that Laviolette is still shielding the two young centers from maybe a little more responsibility than he thinks they’re ready for.
- I thought Ilya Samsonov looked shaky when he was tested in the first two periods but I almost think the Caps dominating the game was at fault there. He was going long stretches in his first game of the season without having to face a shot. He warmed up in the third and was consistently good to end the game. He had enough goal-scoring support for none of that to matter anyway in a 24 save victory.
Numbers thanks to Hockey-reference.com and NaturalStatTrick.com.
