The Washington Capitals unbeaten streak in regulation to start this season has come to an end after they dropped a Monday night decision to the Tampa Bay Lightning 3-2.
Should it have? I’m not sure, so let’s talk about that.
- The Capitals played well enough to win this game. I’d even argue that Andrei Vasilevskiy stole it from them. That is a very good sign when you consider the lineup difficulties that the team is currently going through and the quality of team that the Lightning are. The interference penalty on Tom Wilson that gave Tampa a five-on-three advantage was soft as all heck and was the turning point really. Otherwise, the Capitals created more chances at five-on-five (20 to 18) and fired more shot attempts (35 to 32). That was done through great neutral zone defensive play and entry shutdowns from Caps defensemen as most of the Caps’ chances were created from turning the puck over and getting up the ice quickly. A novel concept that last year’s team would never be able to comprehend. Unfortunately, none of that matters standings-wise as they weren’t able to force an overtime period to at least earn one point. TL;DR the process was good, the result was just a tad unlucky.
- Peter Laviolette leaned hard on his first line to try and get back into this game and they did their damndest but just could not break through on the scoresheet. Alex Ovechkin, Evgeny Kuznetsov, and Tom Wilson all played over 21 minutes and Ovi himself had six shots on goal, nine shot attempts, and six individual scoring chances. His season-opening, point-scoring streak ends at eight games, just as it did in his rookie season.
- The power play scored in the third but man does it still look like a complete mess to me. The Capitals coaches keep preaching about how the unit is maybe getting a bit unlucky but I don’t really agree. There are just no new ideas and haven’t been for like over ten years. Looking at the power play from a “per 60 minutes” standpoint, the Caps rank 25th in shot attempts, 26th in scoring chances, 29th in high danger chances, and 26th in expected goals. That’s unacceptable when you look at the talent on the roster and that’s all while getting on average the fifth most time up a man in the league per game. I’m begging them to put some new blood on the top unit while Nicklas Backstrom and TJ Oshie are out that isn’t just “dependable veteran” number 167. While we’re on this topic, has anyone seen John Carlson?
Per @PR_NHL, this is the first time three players from the same NHL Draft class played in a game two years after they were selected by the Capitals since 2011-12 season, when Dmitry Orlov, Marcus Johansson and Cody Eakin played after being selected in 2009. https://t.co/r71tqFTPN8
— CapitalsPR (@CapitalsPR) November 2, 2021
- Brett Leason scored his first NHL goal thanks to Victor Hedman basically doing the whole own goal thing. You cant score if you don’t shoot though…some dude named Wayne said something like that once. Leason is the third Capitals rookie to score this season, Hendrix Lapierre and Martin Fehervary being the others, which sees the team trail only Anaheim in the number of rookies to score so far in the 2021-22 campaign. Pretty decent output for an old folks home.
- Leason played a grand total of five minutes and 58 seconds in this game. His linemate and rookie debutant Aliaksei Protas played even less at three minutes and 52 seconds. I do not understand the reasoning behind calling up your actual developing prospects and having them stapled to the bench for that long. It’s not the year 1972. I don’t care if you’re chasing in a game and have a day off the next day. Call up one of the 19 career AHLers you have in Hershey to do that instead. I’m sure we can argue about the experience of just being up with the big club being good for them yadda yadda yadda. In my opinion, that’s a load of horse manure. These are guys (speaking about the current Caps rookies as a whole) that were drafted in 2019 and 2020. Playing 20 minutes of pro hockey even in the AHL would be better and they’d get an increased role if instead, the AHL vets had been called up. I am just a random hockey man on the Internet though so you don’t have to take my word for gospel and I would never ask you to.
- Tom Wilson trended on Twitter again and the hockey subreddit got their dumb pitchforks out for the 89th time because they have trouble forming opinions of their own. He trended because of an incident at the end of the game where Erik Cernak speared him in the balls and he responded by chopping down on Cernak’s arms with a cross-check. Why is this news? Well, Tom hasn’t exactly earned any leeway but also people tend to be out for his blood at any chance they can get. Does anyone care about this if it’s anyone else involved in the situation? No. Will that matter to these people? No. Do I think Wilson’s actions kinda deserve increased eyeballs? Yes. Is this one of those actions? No. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Numbers thanks to Hockey-reference.com and NaturalStatTrick.com.
