The Washington Capitals sent their fans home happy with another playoff win at Capital One Arena over the Carolina Hurricanes. It took overtime and a Brooks Orpik blast to get it done as the Caps now head to Raleigh up 2-0 in the series.
The Caps out-shot the Canes 33 to 28.
- Believe it or not, I feel like this game was actually more of a complete effort from the Caps than they put out in Game One. The Canes just got a lot of bounces and some fantastic goaltending from Petr Mrazek. The Caps created a ton of chances off of rushes up ice, taking down the high quality chance battle 10 to 8 at five-on-five. Keep on trucking.
- One thing that was definitely better from the Caps in Game One was their power play. The Caps had over ten minutes of power play time in this game and only created one high danger chance during those minutes. They went scoreless on the five minute major dolled out to Micheal Ferland and truthfully a lot of that is probably due to how long the second unit was out during it.
- Stay hot Nicklas Backstrom. The Swedish maestro has opened the scoring in both games to start this series and has six goals in his last five games this season.
Nicklas Backstrom of the @Capitals scored in the first period to record his 101st career point in the #StanleyCup Playoffs.
He passed Daniel Alfredsson for sole possession of fourth place on the NHL’s all-time list among Swedish players. #NHLStats pic.twitter.com/VMXk5hgDJD
— NHL Public Relations (@PR_NHL) April 13, 2019
- Brooks Orpik has four career playoff goals, two of them are overtime winners and another is a regulation game winner. When he scores, it matters. He’s one of 11 defensemen in NHL history with at least two overtime goals and one of three active defensemen.
- Orpik (38 years, 199 days) is the oldest defenseman in NHL history to score an overtime goal in the playoffs. The previous record was set by the Minnesota Wild’s Keith Carney (38 years, 68 days) in 2008.
- Now, can we talk about Alex Ovechkin? This man is another type of beast in the playoffs. It was like he was operating on hibernate mode for like the last twenty games of the regular season to prepare for these moments. He is absolutely flying out there and putting a giant stamp of his impact on the game whether he hits the back of the net or not.
- It is not sustainable for an entire postseason to have your fourth line playing just above eight minutes a night and one of your defensemen in Christian Djoos playing under six minutes. Something needs to change there.
Numbers thanks to Hockey-reference.com and NaturalStatTrick.com.
Full RMNB Coverage of Game Two
Headline photo: Rob Carr
