The Washington Capitals’ win streak has ended at four games as the Dallas Stars came into town and beat them 3-2 in regulation. It’s the first regulation loss the team has suffered in the month of March.

Bummer, but at least Braden was there.

• The Capitals really only played a 20-minute game against the Stars at five-on-five and it cost them. In the first two periods, the Stars had 27 scoring chances to only 2 in the third. The Caps gave it their best to mount a comeback in the final frame but you really wish they had come out the same way in the earlier periods against a team and goaltender that had played the day prior.
• Alex Ovechkin got on the board for career goal number 770. The strike gave him the twelfth 40-goal season of his career, tying him with Wayne Gretzky for the most seasons of that ilk in the history of the NHL. The one-time cannon seems to be firing on all cylinders right now as Ovi has eight goals in eight March games.
• I thought Vitek Vanecek was absolutely stellar again even in the loss. He had a whole lot to do and still gave his team a chance to win with his 35 save effort. That one stop he made in tight on Jason Robertson was a thing of beauty.

Alex Ovechkin (40-36—76 in 62 GP) became the fourth player this season to hit 40 goals, joining Auston Matthews, Leon Draisaitl and Chris Kreider.#NHLStats: https://t.co/GyNt1twebb pic.twitter.com/hEVzF1boLO

— NHL Public Relations (@PR_NHL) March 20, 2022

• Dmitry Orlov entered the double-digit goal club with his tenth of the season. The last time Dima had ten goals in a season was 2017-18 and that year was pretty great, wasn’t it?
• Evgeny Kuznetsov tallied an assist on Ovechkin’s goal, extending his point streak to eight games and giving him 12 total points in March. Kuzy had a jam-packed individual game as he led the team in shots on goal (6), shot attempts (10), scoring chances (6), and high danger chances (2).
• Connor McMichael has been really excellent recently as he has returned to his natural center ice position. That’s why I was a little confused as to why he was demoted to the de facto fourth line and only given a little over eight minutes of ice time. The line switching to start the game after such a successful stretch of games was definitely perplexing.

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