The Washington Capitals played their first game in 2023 on Tuesday night against the Buffalo Sabres. The Caps took a third-period lead in the game but were unable to keep it as they fell in overtime 5-4 to Tage Thompson and…yea, pretty much just Tage Thompson.
Bit of an up-and-down game. Weird one.
- The Caps definitely grew into this game and I think playing without a lead for a lot of it was a bit of a wake-up call. The first period wasn’t good enough which led to some major line shifting later in the action. The Sabres blitzed them a bit early on with 12 scoring chances in the first twenty minutes. It felt like the Caps eventually wrangled the game back and halfway through the third when Ovi put them up for the first time things were looking really good. But, then they fell off again and let Buffalo right back in it. Like I said in the intro, weird one with a bunch of ups and a bunch of downs.
- I mentioned the line shifting and I don’t think you’d be surprised to know that Peter Laviolette deployed eight unique combinations in that game. One thing I noticed that will probably come into play again once Tom Wilson and Nicklas Backstrom are officially back is that Aliaksei Protas was the main guy that had to suffer for all of the jumblings. He played a team-low 8:43 and sat for the last ten minutes of the game plus overtime. Oh, also did we really see Nic Dowd playing in the top six or did we just imagine all of that?
- Alex Ovechkin keeps on scoring goals. He put away career numbers 807 and 808 on Tuesday night and is now on pace for an absurd 57-goal, 96-point season at the age of 37. His first goal of the night was his first career goal against Sabres goaltender Ukko-Pekka Luukkonen, meaning UPL has become the 167th different goaltender Ovechkin has scored on in his career.
- Laviolette went back to putting Ovi with Evgeny Kuznetsov after Ovi had some middling results alongside Dylan Strome early in the game. I warned against that pairing in a recent morning numbers post for defensive reasons but they actually were killer in this game at five-on-five. With the Ovi-Kuzy-Sheary line on the ice in their 7:54 of five-on-five ice time, the Caps saw positive differentials in shot attempts (+8), scoring chances (+7), high-danger chances (+3), and scored two times. Still, I worry about the longterm viability of the Ovi-Kuzy connection. I will be keeping an eye on it especially once Backstrom is back and Strome is likely pivoted to the wing.
- MoneyPuck really did not like this game from Darcy Kuemper and actually kinda puts the loss squarely on his shoulders. Their expected goals model says he stopped 2.46 fewer goals than expected in the game compared to Buffalo’s UPL who they thought should have saved about half a goal (0.41) more. Kuemper made 24 saves on 29 shots in the loss.
- Although he didn’t get on the scoresheet, it still looks like everything that Erik Gustafsson touches is gold right now. With him on the ice at five-on-five in a team-high 20:43 of ice time, the Caps out-attempted Buffalo 21 to 9, out-scoring chanced them 10 to 4, out-high danger chanced them 6 to 1, and outscored them 2 to 0.
Numbers thanks to Hockey-reference.com and NaturalStatTrick.com.
