The Washington Capitals were down three of their regular centers but that didn’t phase them too much as they were able to dogfight with the Jets and take them down 5-2.
Oh man, that one felt good.
- From an overall game perspective I don’t think you can ask for much more from this current Capitals team. They fought their butts off and delivered two points on the road. Ian said last night that the fight they showed is pretty much all you can want from your favorite team as a fan. I was weirdly proud watching that effort, especially the third period. After a not-so-good end to the second period, the Caps were able to actually hold the majority of the play in the third and ended up with more scoring chances (13 to 12) and high danger chances (8 to 6) than the Jets in that final frame.
- Vitek Vanecek was absurdly good. He faced 42 Winnipeg shots and turned away 40 of them. I felt like that was easily his most impressive performance of the season.
- I really loved what I saw from Aliaksei Protas in this game. He was assigned the most defensive zone starts of any Caps forward and was who Peter Laviolette deployed against the Jets’ top scoring line featuring Pierre-Luc Dubois and Kyle Connor. In those minutes the Caps were basically even in scoring chances (7 to 8) and scored two goals to the Jets one. I thought Protas’ forechecking work was particularly impressive.
The Capitals have guaranteed themselves a 47-game streak without losing two-straight games in regulation, which is tied for the fifth-longest such streak in franchise history.
— CapitalsPR (@CapitalsPR) December 18, 2021
- Daniel Sprong looks like he’s hit a little bit of a hot streak here. He has goals in back-to-back games but his overall play is what is really noticeable. He fired seven shots on net, had five individual scoring chances, and four individual high danger chances. When Sprong is that active and shooting the puck that much in a game it only means good things for the Caps.
- Congrats are in order for Lavi and soon will be again as he recorded his 691st career win, tying him with Dick Irvin for the 10th most wins by a head coach in NHL history.
- Conor Sheary has picked up a lot of the slack with the amount of missing top offensive talent the Caps continue to see. Four-game point streak for Sheary now and a ton of really clutch points. Love to see it.
- Brett Leason recorded his first career multi-point game and I also thought Michael Sgarbossa was noticeably active with a multi-point game of his own.
Numbers thanks to Hockey-reference.com and NaturalStatTrick.com.
