Capitals take forty minutes off and it turns out you cant do that in the NHL: numbers for the morning after

March 23, 2022 7:37 am

The Washington Capitals dropped their second game in a row in regulation as they took a very uninspired 5-2 home loss to the St. Louis Blues. They basically took the final two periods off. You can’t do that.

Not fun!

I mean that’s just yet another game where the Caps only show up for one period and yea, you’re going to lose games in the NHL when you do that. They honestly might as well have not even taken the ice for the second period and the “comeback” attempt in the third was nonexistent. Peter put this next tidbit in his recap but I’ll restate it for those that missed it. The Capitals owned only 23 percent of the expected goals in the second period meaning the Blues owned the other 77 percent. That’s the opposite of good.
Marcus Johansson re-debuted with the Caps and I thought he was just kinda there. Neither really a positive nor a negative on the game and to be honest that’s kinda his level at this point of his career. He recorded one shot on goal and one hit and that’s about it.
The defense corps just decided to take this game off right after getting a large vote of confidence from their general manager. I don’t think a single one of them was good. Nick Jensen and Michal Kempny were noticeably terrible and John Carlson and Dmitry Orlov couldn’t stop tripping over their own feet with individual errors and a little laziness. Justin Schultz was second on the team in individual scoring chances with four which is good but also telling of how bad overall the team played offensively.

With a goal, Evgeny Kuznetsov has extended his point streak to 10 games (7g, 6a), a career high.

— CapitalsPR (@CapitalsPR) March 22, 2022

Matt Irwin skated a grand total of 28 seconds.
Vitek Vanecek got peppered with 37 shots and the team in front of him was actively sabotaging him at some points but I still think he probably played his worst game in a good bit. Again, directly after receiving a large vote of confidence from his general manager. Brian MacLellan apparently needs to go back to talking about how this team has thoroughly underperformed expectations.
No goals or assists for Alex Ovechkin so his goal-scoring streak ends at four games and his point-scoring streak ends at five games. Start them both back up next game please, Ovi.