The Washington Capitals suffered their second straight blowout loss as they fell on home ice to the Minnesota Wild by a score of 5-1. All of that extra rest proved useless as a Wild team that had also played the day previous made the win look easy.
Yeesh.
- Another game where it just was not there from the drop of the puck for the Caps. They went down very early and never really came close to staging any sort of ravenous comeback even with the Wild basically sitting back and letting them attack for large spells of the game. At the end of the day, it’s probably a good thing those lineup choices were met with only horrid results. The Caps basically just gave up in the third period as well which wasn’t fun to see. They got out-chanced 6 to 2 in the final frame and only created one high danger chance of their own.
- Peter Laviolette put together a first line of Alex Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom, and Marcus Johansson. It was bad. They created almost nothing of value offensively and were on the ice for two goals against. Ovi only had four shot attempts.
- Connor McMichael was also a healthy scratch after a recent stretch of play saw him as the team’s best individual skater at five-on-five statistically. Johan Larsson is the man who entered the lineup for him and he contributed exactly nothing on the scoresheet outside of two hits.
— ✨🌸 Rachel 🌸✨ (@kat326) April 4, 2022
- Vitek Vanecek was god awful again. That’s just fantastic because I and clearly the Caps had thought he turned a corner pre-deadline. Four goals against on only 18 shots right after a game that saw him give up five on only 23 shots.
- Garnet Hathaway tied his single-season career-high in goals with his eleventh of the season. Initially, it looked like an Ovi shot that had gone in so even that was a killjoy.
- At least WrestleMania 38 was awesome. Adrenaline in my soul, the Caps really need to score more than one goal.
Numbers thanks to Hockey-reference.com and NaturalStatTrick.com.
