WASHINGTON, DC — The Washington Capitals will shake up their forward lines Saturday evening as they look to extend a three-game win streak against the Florida Panthers. Speaking to reporters pregame, head coach Spencer Carbery revealed that he plans to make changes to the team’s top two lines.
“We’ll move some things around lineup-wise, but mostly just inside of our top six,” he said. Carbery did not specify his plans but confirmed that Ethen Frank, Alex Alexeyev, and Dylan McIlrath will remain in the press box.
Logan Thompson will be back in net, per Carbery, and will face off against former Capitals goaltender Vitek Vanecek.
Carbery most recently tweaked his top six after the Caps returned from their California road trip, deploying Alex Ovechkin on a line with Pierre-Luc Dubois and Aliaksei Protas while Connor McMichael, Dylan Strome, and Tom Wilson connected on the second line.
Saturday’s changes come after what Carbery saw as a middling performance from his team against the Philadelphia Flyers on Thursday. Though the Capitals pulled out a 3-2 win over their rival, they narrowly escaped a Flyers comeback attempt in a third period Carbery described as a “train wreck.”
“I honestly didn’t think we were very good from start to finish. We were okay,” Carbery said after that game. “We get the early lead, and there were some good moments in the first two periods, and then the third obviously came right off the rails.”
The top six got just a single goal against Philadelphia two nights after netting four against the Detroit Red Wings. Carbery noted that the third and fourth lines stepped up as bigger contributors.
“I thought [the bottom six have] been driving our team a little bit from game to game in certain situations, which has been really helpful in a lot of those games,” he said. “The production, we’ve always felt like driving play is the key for those — Lars’ line and Dowder’s line — of trying to spend as much time as they can in the offensive zone, win your shifts, create momentum for our team, and to turn that into a little bit of production helps.
“Especially when, like last game, I don’t think our top six gets on the board, right? Or they — O scores early and then they get the second two, which we needed those two goals.”
Washington will face a formidable opponent in the Atlantic Division-leading Panthers, who rank third in the Eastern Conference and have gone 7-3-0 in their last 10 games. The two squads will hit the ice for an early-evening game, with puck drop at Capital One Arena set for 5 pm.
