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This is why you get told not to play with your food: numbers for the morning after

By Chris Cerullo

 3 Comments

October 28, 2021 7:39 am

The Washington Capitals let a bad team stick around for far too long and faced the consequences as the Detroit Red Wings found a way to eke out a 3-2 overtime victory on the road.

The Caps shouldn’t be losing to that team. Too casual an effort.

  • I used the word casual before the jump and that’s probably the perfect word to describe this game from the Capitals. They created enough to win and should have won in regulation but just…didn’t, and I think some of that was definitely the ole overlooking a bad opponent that they had an early, easy lead against. They created 14 high danger chances to the Wings four at five-on-five and that 14 is, believe it or not, the most they’ve created in a single game so far this season. I’m not sure you’d really have noticed that because again the finishing and everything else just felt so gosh darn casual. The team is still undefeated in regulation but with how ridiculous the Metro is shaping up to be, you really want those two full points.
  • With that out of the way, it’s time to confess that I hate three-on-three overtime solely because the Capitals have seemingly been so bad at it the past couple of years. They’re now 0-3 in the exhibition mode of NHL hockey this season. Let’s hope that record starts evening out as the season progresses as this year’s Capitals are seemingly very good at the actual five-on-five hockey parts of games.
  • One man that is helping that five-on-five cause is Alex Ovechkin although his goal in this game came on the power play. Ovi now has eight goals and 13 points through seven games which has him first in goals in the league and second in points only to the human hockey point vending machine named Connor McDavid who has another two against Philly with more time to play at the time of writing. Only two of Ovi’s goals and four of his points have come on the power play. Man is on a mission.

  • This might feel like a repeat bullet because it is. The “fourth” line is still playing too much and they got smushed at five-on-five in this game. They were the only line out-chanced by Detroit and that is not because of any sort of specialized defensive assignment as Alex Ovechkin actually started more shifts in the defensive zone than they did. They especially do not need to be playing as much as they did against a team like Detroit. Trust your offensive players against bad teams, please. Refer to this below tweet for what I am talking about ice time wise.

  • Connor McMichael had another very nice game and it feels like he is oh so close to not only his first NHL goal but multiple more after that. He led the team at five-on-five in individual shot attempts with six so it’s not like he’s not shooting. His luck will hopefully turn soon.
  • Vitek Vanecek felt weirdly scrambly in this game to me. I thought the first and last Wings goals were pretty soft and a better goaltending performance probably still gives this casual effort a win at the end of regulation. Both Vanecek and Ilya Samsonov have seemed a little too beatable for my taste in these past few games.

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

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