WASHINGTON, DC — Coming into Tuesday night’s game, the Washington Capitals were — at least in the standings and on the stat sheet — a much better team than the San Jose Sharks. Washington had scored the most goals in the league and given up the eighth fewest, ranking fourth in the NHL standings. Meanwhile, the Sharks had given up the more goals than 30 other teams, ranking last in the Pacific Division and holding the fourth-worst points percentage in the league.
What seemed like a game the Capitals could and probably should dominate instead turned into a 2-1 overtime loss. Washington struggled mightily in the second and third period after a relatively strong start, putting up a sleepy weekday-night performance to hand head coach Spencer Carbery a loss in his first head-to-head NHL game against his longtime friend and former mentee Ryan Warsofsky.
After the loss, Carbery criticized what he viewed as a poor performance from players up and down the lineup.
“It was not good again, especially second and third periods,” he said. “Really disappointed because it was — just from all four lines, all our D-pairs, it was a struggle.”
In Carbery’s eyes, the Capitals’ largest failing wasn’t their difficulty executing on scoring chances but a larger loss of the systematic play that proved successful in the first quarter of the season.
“Our puck play was obviously horrendous, so we couldn’t string together passes. You saw the execution. So that’s fine, you’re going to have off nights where you can’t keep a puck flat, it’s bouncing everywhere, can’t execute or when you do get into situations where you feel like something’s going to miss the net or hits your pads or whatever it might be. So you saw that a hundred times tonight.
“The issue that I have and this is where we just have to continue to learn — and we’ll continue to work on it, we’ll watch it, we’ll get better at it — is on those nights, you’ve got to find a way to at least be able to get to a game that you sustain some pressure, you don’t lose structure defensively, and then you just work your way through that game.”
The Caps outshot the Sharks 13-8 and out-chanced them 14-9 at five-on-five over the first 20 minutes, but came out of it down a goal, thanks in large part to strong goaltending from San Jose goaltender Mackenzie Blackwood. As Blackwood made save after save, Carbery watched his team get more desperate. But instead of relying on tougher, grittier goals, they started looking for a shortcut.
“I could feel it right away from the start of that game, we wanted — and we did a lot of good things in the first period: had some scoring chances — you could tell Blackwood was on his game, he was stopping everything that he saw, we walked into a few scoring chances, [him] gloved them down,” he said. “So you knew, okay, we’re going to have to find ways to hold onto pucks, continue to do the things we’re doing, even though it’s probably going to take two, three rebound, tips, but just stay with it.
“And you could tell we just started to deviate, deviate, deviate because we wanted it easy. We wanted to find a way to score on a two-on-one, get a breakaway. I don’t want to have to go to the net front, I don’t want to have to tip a puck in, I don’t want to have to find a rebound. And that’s where you see, we start to lose our F3. Odd-man rush the other way, scoring chance, Celebrini’s line hems us in for two minutes. All those situations are a product of us deviating and us getting impatient with our game because we could tell [we were thinking], ‘I’ve just got to find a way to cheat to find a goal tonight.’”
So far, the Capitals have proven remarkably resilient under Carbery this season. They’ve put up a record of 6-1-0 in the first game after a loss, likely thanks in part to Carbery’s refusal to excuse away a bad game. Some of his most critical evaluations of his team have come after his team’s gotten a standings point, including an overtime loss against the Toronto Maple Leafs last month that he called “embarrassing on home ice.”
With two days off before they next hit the ice, Carbery and the Capitals will look to bounce back yet again when they play Toronto Friday night.
