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Baffling: Caps beat Islanders 5-2

By Peter Hassett

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April 10, 2023 9:38 pm

The Washington Capitals beat the New York Islanders senselessly on Monday night. By senselessly I mean it didn’t make sense.

Before the game was 69 seconds old, the Caps had already scored twice: first from red-hot Dylan Strome, then from the normal-temperatured Rasmus Sandin. Someone named Craig Smith (???) made it 3-0 after one period – in a game the team for some reason was trying to win.

After a scoreless second period, Hudson Fasching got a net-front rebound to end Darcy Kuemper’s shutout bid, but Tom Wilson got an empty-netter soon after. With the goalie pulled again, Casey Cizikas finished off a nice passing sequence to bring the Islanders back within two goals. After some more empty-net stuff, Dylan Strome scored from his knees to finish it.

Caps win 5-2. The Capitals losing streak ends at six.

  • Alex Ovechkin did not score. He did not play. Nor did Oshie, van Riemsdyk, Mantha, Dowd, Hagelin, and Brown. Probably other guys. I lost count.
  • Ilya Sorokin might be the NHL’s best goalie, but he was positively buttcheeks in the first period, allowing three goals on 10 shots – just 0.82 expected goals. There’s a bunch of factors that allowed Washington to take control of the scoreboard, but goaltending was the biggest.
  • But Sorokin’s skaters had all kinds of problems too. They blew dangerous passes, flubbed odd-man breaks, and couldn’t convert on their chances. By the end of the second period, Washington was genuinely the better team.
  • I think I counted three breakaways for New York’s Jean-Gabriel Pageau. None for him.
  • After scoring the opener and the empty-netter, Dylan Strome has five goals in his last four games, all of which had been losses …up until tonight. I like the player a lot. I hope this is home.
  • And then there’s Evgeny Kuznetsov, who in any sane universe would have been benched a dozen times by now. But in this game and in this universe, he committed a turnover so foolish you’d think he was trying to lose. No, not you. I mean me. I think he’s trying to lose. Here’s how the Caps fared during his shifts after two periods:

  • Teams will sometimes intentionally get worse in the short term to position themselves for improvement in the long term. It’s tanking. But players don’t do that. They shouldn’t do that in theory, and they don’t do that in practice. What Kuznetsov is doing is not tanking. He’s doing something way different – and way worse. I hate watching him.
  • Early in the third period, Conor Sheary flipped a puck into the face of Islanders captain Anders Lee, who was bloodied by it. I don’t think he lost any teeth.
  • We reported earlier how Tom Wilson has not been happy with recent officiating. He has more reason to feel that way after game number eighty. I’m not sure Wilson was unfairly penalized, certainly not for the roughing in retaliation for Pierre Engvall getting froggy with Darcy Kuemper, but Wilson’s PIM tally is growing. He’s got 30 in his last four games.
  • Maybe the most reliable part of Washington’s season has been their penalty kill, which was superb against a sputtering Islanders team, quashing three power plays.
  • Darcy Kuemper went for a couple 200-foot goalie goals at the end there. That would have made tonight pretty special.

We’re held tight in the double bind, wanting good things for our preferred hockey team but knowing that good things probably require losing gams in the short term. On Monday we received a decisive win, but it felt futile because it came so late in the season – and counterproductive for the team’s interests regarding the draft lottery.

If it’s comforting, MoneyPuck says the team lost only 0.7 percent of a chance to sign Connor Bedard. Maybe it’s even more nice to hear that this loss was devastating for the Islanders’ playoff chances —  dropping their odds by about 25 points, down to coin-toss territory versus the Penguins.

So yeah, the Caps helped the Penguins tonight.

Now the Capitals season creak towards its end, but not before they, unrested, face the Boston Bruins on the road tomorrow night. That should be…. fun?

Headline photo: @KristenLee__

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