Pretty fun game last night. Of the Caps games I've seen this year, this was probably the most entertaining (from a Caps perspective. The Flyers game was great if you don't have a stake in who wins).
The Capitals were playing the Red Wings, and despite now having the same record, the Capitals are a much better team, even with their absolutely pathetic bottom half of the roster.
So the game was good. The Caps came out hard, but failed to score the first goal. This is often a disastrous outcome for teams who have been losing, but the Caps recovered.
One thing I noticed though was that even though the Capitals were controlling the majority of the play, the Red Wings were getting better chances. The Caps defense is just so so so so bad. I checked this morning, and the stats bear out the eye-test: Caps had 55% of all shot-attempts, but only 45% of all scoring chances.
My pick for best current stats site is Naturalstattrick.com once you figure out how it works, it's super fast and has anything you could want. Corsica has relaunched, and that's a good one too, but I'm sticking with NST cause for a while they were the only one up, and so they deserve some loyalty.
Anyways, the Caps were pretty lucky to get a point, let alone two, having to tie it with a minute left and the goalie out. Of concern is that the Caps only scored one 5v5 goal last night, and zero on Tuesday against the Toronto Maple Leafs.
While it is true they are fifth in the NHL with 17 5v5 goals so far this season, they have played one game more than most teams, and a large portion of those came in the first two games in the season. They are bottom-ten in CF% so if they don't improve their possession game, I fear their recent trouble scoring when not on the PP will soon be a common problem.
Tonight the Capitals are in for back-to-backs and they'll be traveling to Florida. The Panthers aren't the greatest team, and they blew a 2-0 lead to the Penguins last night and ended up losing 4-3. The problem is that they have only won two games all year and are definitely a better team than they've showed.
They also have a lot of team speed, and the Capitals are terrible at handling fast teams. Win or lose, it's always fun to watch the Panthers as Barkov, Huberdeau and Ekblad are three guys you should try to watch as much as humanly possible.
Washington Capitals Blogger • 
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