This has the potential to become a very doom-and-gloom recap so I'll keep it short...if only to appease the little voice in the back of my head that's saying "it's just one game" over and over again.
What a fiasco. It's never a good omen when your team takes a penalty off the opening faceoff, and it was basically downhill from there.
Good
- Ovechkin gets his 100th career goal - congrats to Ovie on such an amazing accomplishment, even if it did come in a loss.
- Olie looked pretty sharp, stopping 38 of 41 shots to hold the Caps in a game they had no business being in. Period.
- Jagr didn't score a goal. He had some assists, sure, but no goals. I'm counting that as a positive in a game that had so few positives.
- The Caps got a little better as the game went on. And I mean that in a completely relative sense.
- The last 5 seconds of the 2nd period.
- A few other notable performances were those by Matt Pettinger, Mike Green, and........nope. I'm out. 4 players showed up tonight, eh? That might have been part of the problem.
Bad
- The entire first period, minus Ovechkin's goal.
- The Caps came into this game having taken only 12 penalties through three games and yielding no goals while being a man down. They limp out again having taken another 7 and giving up all three goals. Makes you realize just how much you miss someone like Boyd Gordon, doesn't it? His absence was palpable.
- ...everything else after Ovechkin's goal.
I don't know. This one was just...long. And boring. And awful. After two straight jaw-droppingly good games and a scrappy come from behind win, it was frankly a little shocking to see the Caps come out flat and stay flat all night. Some of it can be blamed on injuries, sure - without Gordon in the lineup you have to shuffle the regular formations, bump Steckel up, bring in Sutherby, adjust the penalty kill, etc. But did his injury create some sort of mass amnesia among his teammates that rendered them unable to remember what playing hockey looked like?
Let's hope they rebound, and fast. The Sabres may not be quite the threat they once were but as Atlanta found out yesterday they can still score, and if the Caps' offense continues to be as anemic as it has been we could have problems.
No gameday preview for tomorrow - enjoy the game, everyone.
Update: As further proof that my NHL world must remain balanced (and that none of my teams can ever win in the same night) the Flames earned their first win by beating the Stars in overtime. Go Flames!
Friday, October 12, 2007
Streak Ends at Three
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3 comments:
Perhaps I'm looking a little too hard for the silver lining, but I thought they had a good third period. They managed to outshoot the Rangers 11-4 and took control, forcing them to take the dumb penalties that the Caps were taking left and right in the first. Too little, too late though.
Yeah, the third wasn't so bad - I think by that point I was simply catatonic and beyond caring.
(And I still owe you an e-mail, I know! Sorry about that...)
Can I point out that the refs were making me an angry girl too? I understand that the Caps deserved most, if not all, of their penalties. And, yes, they did wave the goal that was tipped in by a high stick. But Olie gets clobbered in the head and can't defend against the goal and there's no call? Ridiculous.
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