The Washington Capitals returned from their week off and have lost both games they’ve played while only scoring two total goals. This time against the Flyers 2-1. That’s not gonna work.
Things need to start turning around quickly.
- The Capitals had the majority of the puck for the final forty minutes but just could not create enough dangerous offense. They played way too much of a perimeter game and it cost them. All of that puck possession and they still ended up out-chanced at five-on-five by the Flyers 25 to 17. There’s just obviously something not clicking right now in various aspects of their game but the staleness of their play offensively is what jumped out to me from this game. Almost felt like they were going through the motions of a system that just isn’t working.
- I thought one somewhat bright spot was that Ilya Samsonov looked a lot better and made several sparkling stops in his 20 save effort. It’s just that it seems to be impossible sometimes for him to maintain that sort of consistency for an entire game let alone multiple in a row.
- We saw quite a bit of line blending from Peter Laviolette during this game. According to NaturalStatTrick, the Caps put out 11 different trios on the ice. I would expect some version of what he changed to stick past this game.
It took all of 11 seconds for Claude Giroux (@28CGiroux) to open the scoring today – the fastest goal from the start of a game by an @NHLFlyers player in nearly 33 years.#NHLStats: https://t.co/IhQQaL7gc3 https://t.co/zpzXP2BpbM
— NHL Public Relations (@PR_NHL) February 26, 2022
- TJ Oshie was the Caps best player for my money. He scored on the power play and had four individual scoring chances in the game. His ability to keep plays alive has always been one of his main strengths and it’s very noticeable now that he’s back in the lineup.
- I counted three or four plays from John Carlson that were just headscratchers. I thought he had a really rough one.
- Before this game the Flyers had won a grand total of two games since December 30. They were amid a six-game losing streak.
Numbers thanks to Hockey-reference.com and NaturalStatTrick.com.
