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Caps lose Stadium Series 4-1 to Canes, utterly pathetic

By Peter Hassett

 7 Comments

February 18, 2023 11:11 pm

The Washington Capitals looked snazzy for their big outdoor game against the Carolina Hurricanes. But they played terribly. They got methodically dismantled by a superior team in front of 56,961 fans, a national TV audience, and some clown named Jake Owen.

Two minutes into the game, the Canes scored on their first shot: a deflection from Jesperi Kotkaniemi. The Canes scored three in the second period, starting with Paul Stastny all alone up front, middling with Martin Necas’ one-timer on the power, and lasting with Teuvo Teravainen on the rush.

The Caps played apocalyptically bad in the third period, but Tom Wilson got a goal from no-angle to crack the shutout.

Caps lose 4-1. Awful.

  • Boy, those jerseys sure looked good. Way better than Carolina’s, where the jersey numbers were not legible on the TV. I also didn’t like their helmets.
  • What’s something else not-the-game I can talk about? Oh, the dog. The dog was great.

  • People often say, “we don’t deserve dogs,” but they’re wrong. We invented dogs. We saw big, scary wolves and over ten thousand years or whatever we turned them into pugs. We deserve dogs.
  • Jake Owen? More like Jake NO-wen. Two-first-name-having panderer.
  • Okay, fine. I give up. Hockey bullets now. The Caps didn’t get massively outshot in the first period, but they could not generate any good chances up front. Offense is still absent.
  • The Caps had a good chance on a power play one time when Dylan Strome, who normally doesn’t play on the man advantage, made some noise in the paint.
  • Matt Irwin lost his man on the Kotkaniemi goal. Nick Jensen lost all object permanence on the Stastny goal.
  • Tom Wilson returned to action after missing seven games to a lower-body injury. He scored his third of his season (just nine games) from the top line, which was the team’s best line.
  • Unlike the second line of Johansson-Backstrom-Sheary, who were abysmal, unplayable, execrable, clown vehicular, butt-tier, post-Cliff Metallica, bad.
  • Ian ran a story earlier about how the Caps said they were going to win this game for Ovechkin and all that. “We want to get a win for our captain, for O.” They failed spectacularly. If I were Ovechkin, I’d be insulted by this effort.
  • When a team is trailing, you generally expect them to control play better and get more offense – a combination of their desperation and the other team playing conservatively. Instead, Washington played equally as bad in the third period, just never-ending cascades of failure in the only zone Carolina permitted them to play in. You have to hope they just gave up, because if this is what they look like when they’re trying, they’re trash.

The Hurricanes simply outclassed the Capitals, but even if you’re accommodating for the massive gap in available talent, the Capitals’ performance was still insufficient. Even their healthy lines, unaffected by absences, were terrible. Even if your expectations were already low, the team was lower. This was a total collective failure. It was a terrible hockey game. I am diminished for having watched it. I’m a sadder, smaller man than I was three hours ago.

The Athletic’s excellent reporter Tarik El-Bashir said this “was supposed to be a big week in terms of helping GM Brian MacLellan determine which direction to go at the deadline.” The Caps lost every game, mostly in humiliating fashion, none worse than tonight. There are two directions the team could go at the deadline, and the other one is wrong.

Headline photo: @kkmortier

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