The Washington Capitals got back on track in the month of November with a 5-3 regulation win over the Buffalo Sabres. It involved more milestones, a power play goal (!), another injury, and some more questionable ice time management.
Let’s talk about that.
- Fun fact, that title is actually a grammatically correct sentence. What a language.
- This was another game against very weak opposition, similar to the game against the Coyotes, where the Capitals absolutely dominated the first period but then just let off the gas a little and let a bad team stick with them for too long. It didn’t prove to be too much of an issue however because the defense did a really good job keeping Buffalo to the outside and away from the slot as you can see in the above heat map. They also got good traffic in front of Tokarski evidenced by what felt like every single goal being tipped in some sort of way.
- Alex Ovechkin has tied Brett Hull at 741 career goals, good for fourth all time in NHL history. He also casually had another three point game, including grabbing his 600th career assist on the final goal from John Carlson. Just another day at the office. This kind of scoring pace is obviously going to slow down but at 36-years-old and over 10-percent through the season, Ovi is on pace for 75 goals and 143 points.
- Evgeny Kuznetsov also had another great night and as long as he’s playing like this, Ovi is going to have all the chances in the world this season to do something special. Kuzy racked up three assists and put himself back into the top five in scoring in the league behind only Draisaitl, McDavid, Ovi, and Kyle Connor. His third assist was the 300th of his career.
With an assist on Ovechkin's goal, Evgeny Kuznetsov has recorded his 432nd career point to pass Dennis Maruk (431) for 11th on the franchise points list.
— CapitalsPR (@CapitalsPR) November 9, 2021
- Axel Jonsson-Fjallby made his NHL debut and then promptly played a total of five minutes and 43 seconds. Brett Leason played a similar amount at five minutes and 54 seconds. You already know how I feel about this so I won’t force you to read it again. With Nic Dowd going down, who wasn’t even on their line, they got stapled to the bench harder rather than given more opportunity against a Buffalo team that basically trots out 75-percent of an AHL lineup. I don’t know, folks.
- Even with Dowd gone for the majority of the game, Connor McMichael only played more in this game at five-on-five (11:28) than AJF, Leason, and Dowd. You won’t be surprised to hear that with McMichael on the ice at the aforementioned five-on-five, the Capitals held a plus-two shot attempt differential, plus-five scoring chance differential, and a plus-two high danger chance differential. Those were all team highs. Maybe Lavi will be forced to show more trust in him given that the Dowd injury situation unfortunately did not look great.
- I have very known issues with the “fourth” line. I think they’re a needed change of pace on this roster as a whole but that change of pace shouldn’t involve them taking a million penalties and they shouldn’t play as much as they do. They’re a line where that when they’re thrown over the boards you know it’s likely that neither team is going to score. That is a valuable line to have, but sometimes you actually need to score goals to win hockey games and sometimes they have off nights where the opposition is killing them (like the recent Philly game) and they have no ability to respond offensively. Like why is Garnet Hathaway getting over 12 minutes at five-on-five in this game even after the center of his line goes down injured quite early on? I don’t know what the exact solution here is and I’m sure some of you vehemently disagree but that’s where I’m at right now.
Numbers thanks to Hockey-reference.com and NaturalStatTrick.com.
