The Washington Capitals are on a roll. The surging Caps took down the Ottawa Senators 3-2 in overtime up north on Thursday and have now won five road games in a row and eight of their last nine overall.
Keep riding this wave.
- Apologies for missing you all on Tuesday morning. That will hopefully be very rare. Anyway, I would have been pretty upset if the Caps had not managed to come away with the full two points from Thursday’s game and that’s because they managed to put together another very nice performance. They’re forcing opposing goaltenders to have to come up with excellent performances to even keep their teams in games and even that is proving to not be enough in cases like this one. I was really most impressed with the third-period output where although that was the only period they did not score in, they controlled five-on-five play even with some dodgy officiating throwing a wrench into matters. At five-on-five, they out-attempted Ottawa 17 to 9 and out-chanced them 11 to 4 trying to find that regulation winner in the final frame.
- The big story of the evening was once again the wait for Alex Ovechkin to tie and then pass Gordie Howe for second all-time in goals. It didn’t happen as Ovi is now without a goal for four-straight games which ties his previous season-long drought this year. It is really nice that the team has decided to just be very good and fun to watch while we wait for this other shoe to drop or else it’d probably be a little agonizing.
- I do not understand why Peter Laviolette flipped Sonny Milano and Marcus Johansson in his forward lines. Milano had formed a fantastic partnership with Evgeny Kuznetsov that saw number 92 involved a ton offensively and not hurting his team defensively. With Kuznetsov on the ice at five-on-five in this game, the Caps saw negative differentials in shot attempts (-2), scoring chances (-3), high-danger chances (-2), and got scored on. Why tinker with something that was so obviously working? Johansson and Lars Eller had also just combined for an utterly dominant performance possession-stats-wise against Detroit. Milano at this stage of his career is clearly most effective playing in the top six with top talent. He has 15 points in 22 games. Just leave it alone. Bizarre.
Erik Gustafsson was credited with the primary assist on Johansson's overtime goal, his 12th assist of the season. Gustafsson has now recorded six points (4g, 2a) in his last three games.
— CapitalsPR (@CapitalsPR) December 23, 2022
- Dmitry Orlov came out of the matchup with extremely good results at five-on-five. In his team-leading 19:16 of ice time there, the Caps saw positive differentials in shot attempts (+9), scoring chances (+9), and high-danger chances (+5). The bulk of those minutes came against Tim Stützle (9:36), Claude Giroux (9:10), and Brady Tkachuk (8:04) as well. Impressive.
- One record that Ovi did finally take down was passing Ray Bourque for the most shots in NHL history at 6,210. Per Caps PR, since entering the NHL for the 2005-06 season, Ovechkin leads the league in shots, holding a 2,398-shot lead over the next-closest player who is Eric Staal at 3,813.
- Darcy Kuemper started his first game since December 3 after missing eight in a row. He did everything that he was supposed to in the 23-save victory. MoneyPuck had him saving 0.2 goals above expected which brings his season total to just over 4.1.
Numbers thanks to Hockey-reference.com and NaturalStatTrick.com.
