The Washington Capitals and Carolina Hurricanes kicked off their Round 2 series at Capital One Arena last night. Well, at least the Hurricanes did. The Capitals unfortunately looked lost all night. They spent way too much time overpassing and being sloppy with the puck, they struggled to get any coherent plays set up, and their zone entries were consistently inconsistent. They also had several rough turnovers, none more brutal than the one in the third period that led directly to Logan Stankoven’s game-tying goal.
With a little over ten minutes to go in the third, Aliaksei Protas had the puck between the left faceoff circle and the wall in the Washington zone. He saw Alex Alexeyev in the circle and decided to pass it back to him, which would have been ill-advised regardless but was even worse because he accidentally sent his pass in the path of Jesperi Kotkaniemi’s skate. Alexeyev then failed to corral the errant pass, and Kotkaniemi pounced on the turnover and fed a perfect pass to Stankoven in the slot.
The Capitals had 14 total shots on goal last night. 14. In a Stanley Cup Playoff game. They were almost always going to get out-shot by the Hurricanes, but a 33-14 shot differential in Carolina’s favor is unacceptable. The Caps only managed three shots on goal in the third period, and they had none in three minutes of overtime. Even worse is this stat nugget that Dimitri Filipovic shared after the game: the Capitals had ten 5v5 SOG total tonight, and Jaccob Slavin had 5 on his own.
The Capitals must be better prepared for Game 2 tomorrow. Logan Thompson can only do so much in a game—at a certain point, Washington needs to up the offense and do more than sit on their heels and just hang on for dear life. Hopefully the final score and game stats will wake this team up for tomorrow night because if they keep playing like this, the series is going to be over before they know it.
