Multi-Talented Caps

Through Saturday night's games, the NHL had seen 307 multiple-goal performances so far this season - that's up from 287 such games at the same time last year.

Not surprisingly, the biggest jump from last year has come right here in DC, where the combined forces of a potent offense and a balanced attack have led to a number of players getting involved in the offense - and doing so multiple times.

More on multiple-goal games:

• Nicklas Backstrom's 2-goal game against Buffalo brought the team total up to 27 multi-goal games; no team has more than 18 (Philadelphia).
• At least one Caps player has had a 2-goal performance in 23 of the 38 games the Capitals have played so far this year. They are 18-3-2 in those games.
• Alex Ovechkin has 8 multi-goal games on his resume. That equals the team total for both Ottawa and Florida, and is more than the totals of 8 other teams (Boston, Buffalo, Carolina, Chicago, Detroit, Minnesota, and Phoenix).
• Ovechkin and Alexander Semin have combined for 13 games multi-goal games. That's equal to or greater than the total multi-goal games of 27 other teams.
• Nine different Caps have scored multiple times in a single game this season; only Pittsburgh has as many, and only one Penguin - Sidney Crosby - has repeated the feat more than once.
• Of the nine, five have had more than one multiple-goal game - Ovechkin, Semin, Brooks Laich, Backstrom and Tomas Fleischmann. All but Laich have had at least four. No other team has more than three players with at least four multi-goal games.
• Ovechkin's 8 multi-goal games lead the league, ahead of Patrick Marleau (7), Crosby (6), Semin (5); Ilya Kovalchuk (5), and Marian Gaborik (5). There are 10 players tied with 4.
• Each of the Caps' first four games featured a multi-goal game, and only once have they gone more than two games without one.
• The longest "drought" between multi-goal games for the Caps so far this year was 7 games (11/13 - 11/25). Their record in those 7 games: 3-2-2, with just 15 goals scored during that stretch.

Of course, this is all just another way of saying the Caps have scary good offensive abilities, and they share the wealth well. To have that many multi-goal games so early in the season is somewhat astounding. And yet with all the shiny, pretty numbers above there remains one still out of reach for the Caps.

So far this season there have been 32 hat tricks League-wide, with 29 players on 19 different teams getting in on the fun.

Number of hat tricks for the Caps: 0.