The Washington Capitals will wrap up their lengthy road trip out west on Monday night when they match up with the Calgary Flames. They split the first four games so they’ll be looking to take out Calgary and leave Canada with a winning record.
In the team’s last outing, they ground out a 2-1 victory over the Vancouver Canucks in TJ Oshie’s 1,000th career NHL game. Head coach Spencer Carbery liked what he saw from his team in that performance and is sticking with the same exact lineup against the Flames.
Here’s a refresher on what that will look like.
“Same lineup, Chuckie will go for us,” Carbery said. “Same forward, [defense] combinations.”
After Oshie was a game-time decision with an upper-body injury for his big night on Saturday, the 37-year-old winger took Monday morning’s optional skate off. However, Carbery was not at all concerned about his availability against Calgary.
Nicolas Aube-Kubel, Mike Sgarbossa, and Ethan Bear remain healthy scratches as they have the past few games. Bear is still trying to recover from an illness that kept him off the ice for a short period of time.
“It’s a matter of him getting back up to speed from missing a few days skating there,” Carbery said. “We’ll go with the same lineup and give him another opportunity to just get back up to it and we’ll see where we go when we get back home.”
While the Capitals are aware that a win would see them move up into playoff position in the Eastern Conference, Carbery warned against peeking at the standings.
“Trying to just stay in the moment and finish this road trip off right and continue the momentum that we’ve generated over the last couple games with the way that we’ve played,” he said. “That’s really it. Just a singular focus on today doing what we can to play real well against a good team that’s been on a decent run.”
The Flames have won eight of their last 12 games including two straight on home ice. Their recent stretch of good play comes despite some big roster subtractions via trade this season.
Nikita Zadorov, Elias Lindholm, Chris Tanev, and Noah Hanifin have all been dealt away in the past three to four months. Those big moves, prioritizing the team’s future over their present, have changed the way the team plays according to Carbery.
“There’s some adjustments that we’ve seen through the film but then also their analytics of what they’re doing differently from a team perspective,” he said. “We can’t just go off of what we saw in I think game two of the season.”
The Capitals took down the Flames 3-2 in a shootout all the way back on October 16. Matthew Phillips scored his first NHL goal in that game against his former team and since then has been waived, played for the Pittsburgh Penguins, been waived again, and is now playing for the Hershey Bears.
Nicklas Backstrom also played 18:33 of ice time in the win and Evgeny Kuznetsov used his signature, slow shootout move to win the game.
