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Superstar saving from Stars netminder slays streak: Stars beat Capitals 2-1

By Chris Cerullo

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December 15, 2022 9:40 pm

The Washington Capitals will be at home for four of their next five games and that run of play started Thursday night against the Dallas Stars. All eyes were on The Great Eight yet again as he has some more hockey history in his sights.

Conor Sheary tapped home the game’s opening marker via a fantastic Alex Ovechkin feed. Jamie Benn and Colin Miller put two quick ones past Charlie Lindgren at the very start of the third to tilt the game in Dallas’ favor.

Stars beat Capitals 2-1.

  • An incredibly even first period which is great news for the Caps because the Stars are ridiculously good this season. Both teams had their chances and both teams needed their goaltenders to be brilliant on a few occasions to keep things scoreless after twenty minutes.
  • Segei Ovechkin aka Ovi Jr got the honor of turning his dad’s Capital One Arena goal counter over to the big number 800. Hopefully, in like thirty years, we’re doing this whole thing all over again but with him wearing the Capitals jersey on the ice this time.
  • They played the Peacemaker opening theme song in the arena at some point in the first which just made me think about James Gunn and how Henry Cavill is not coming back as Superman and how he left the Netflix Witcher show to play Superman and now he’s just not doing both and that sucks and why the heck is the DCU always so messy like this and Peacemaker was awesome though.

  • An almost absurdly dominant second period from the Caps at least in terms of the twenty minutes they seemingly had the puck. Until Anthony Mantha gave it away and then took that late penalty it felt like they had spent the last ten minutes all in the offensive zone. Only one goal to show for it though.
  • What an unreal pass from Alex Ovechkin to Conor Sheary for the opening goal. I think just about everyone in the world, including Stars goaltender Jake Oettinger, thought that was going to be a one-time blast from his office. Instead, it was a deft backdoor feed that gave Sheary an empty net for his tenth strike of the season.
  • That assist was Ovi’s 35th point of the season in his 32nd game. In his age-37 season, he’s currently on pace to score 51 goals and record 90 total points.
  • Look, all things stats and even sometimes my eyeballs say Anthony Mantha is a great player. It’s just that he really does some stuff sometimes that drives me absolutely insane. The Caps are dominating the entire second period until he is soft on the puck to turn it over and then he takes an incredibly lazy penalty that led to Dallas scoring against the run of play at the very start of the third. That completely turned the game around. He does things like that far too often and has been lucky to not be penalized more for it.

  • Two quick ones in the Caps’ net to start the third and they took too long to get going to try and find the tying marker.
  • Jake Oettinger has been annoyingly fantastic in net for Dallas against the Caps. Good lord. He ends the Capitals’ five-game winning streak.
  • I caught a glimpse of one Brian Sutherby when NBC Sports Washington showed some old footage of Ovi’s first-ever goal against the Stars. Sutherby is a former Cap and Star that is now a scout for the Caps post-playing days. He was one of my favorites on some truly terrible Caps teams.

Next up the Caps will host Mitch Marner and the rest of the Toronto Maple Leafs. That means we get a Steve Dangle video on a Caps game. Let’s go.

Headline photo courtesy of @pennybacker

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