Throughout the season, we’ll check in on the Washington Capitals to see which players, positions, and/or systems are hot and who is…well, not. Today we’re assessing the team based on their games between December 1-8.
Opponents: Sharks (2-1 OTL), Maple Leafs (3-1 W), Canadiens (4-2 W)
Hot Front
The top six. The Caps have had a great deal of success this season because of contributions up and down the lineup, relying on all four lines to chip in with offense. This week was a rare stretch where the top two lines really drove most of the scoring, though, with Tom Wilson, Pierre-Luc Dubois, Connor McMichael, and Aliaksei Protas all having multipoint weeks. Not that surprising, considering the strong start to the season for all of those players, but nice to see them help carry the team when needed.
Matt Roy. Roy doesn’t have the offensive tools – or expectations for scoring – that his fellow newcomer on the blueline, Jakob Chychrun, has, but he has quietly been very good since returning from that early-season injury. This week was more of the same, and it saw him get rewarded, picking up two assists to lead the team’s blueliners in scoring over the last three games.
Nic Dowd. Last week we picked on him a little bit for his propensity for taking bad (and often ill-timed) penalties. This week, he not only stayed out of the box (although he did take an abuse of officials misconduct at the end of that overtime loss to San Jose, adding 10 PIMs to his season total) but also tied Tom Wilson for the team lead in scoring with two goals and an assist, and led the whole team in xG% and HDCF% at even strength.
The goalies. The Capitals gave up just five goals in their last three games, and a big reason for that was the goaltending, as both Charlie Lindgren and Logan Thompson really stepped up for their teammates this week, bailing them out at times when they weren’t at their best. Lindgren posted a .952 save percentage in his one outing, a 20-save win in Toronto, and Thompson turned aside 51 of the 55 shots he faced (including a perfect 10-for-10 in high-danger shots) for a .927. Pretty, pretty, pretty, good.
The penalty kill. The Caps have, somewhat quietly it seems, moved into the top-three in the league while shorthanded, currently operating at an 83.7% clip; only the Rangers (85.5%) and Predators (87.9%) have been better. This week they killed off seven of their eight shorthanded chances, giving up just 12 shots while down a man and allowing just a single goal – the 4-on-3 strike in overtime against the Sharks.
Cold Snap
The bottom six. Sometimes we have to get a little nit-picky with these, because the team is playing so well right now, and this would definitely fall into that category…so please keep that in mind. Having said that, it was a quiet week, offensively speaking, for the players who make up the team’s third and fourth lines. Dowd was really the only one to pick up much in the way of offense, with Ivan Miroshnichenko adding an assist but nothing else from Brandon Duhaime, Hendrix Lapierre, Lars Eller, and Andrew Mangiapane.
The power play. A rare (!) quiet week for the team’s extra-man squad, Dylan Strome’s tally to extend their lead to two over Montreal on Saturday standing as the only success by the power play in 10 chances over the last three games. Of course, two of those 10 power plays were cut short by a Capital taking a penalty of their own…but that’s not exactly good news. Minimal shots on net over that span, as well, and just 15 scoring chances, both of which you’d like to see higher. Worth noting that they did face three of the better penalty-killing squads in the league this week, though; Montreal is fifth, Toronto sixth, and San Jose checks in at 11th.
Trap game performance. The Caps have had a few games on the schedule that could be classified as “trap” games, and occasionally they have fallen into those traps, the most recent one being Tuesday’s match against the young but low-ranked Sharks. They proceeded to come out sluggish, get outshot by the Sharks, manage very little offense, and find themselves shorthanded in overtime courtesy of a bad, ill-timed penalty by Tom Wilson. That they managed to get a point out of that one is a positive, of course; it’s a credit to just how good they are that they can take one of their worse performances and still manage to emerge with a standings point (and might have even snagged two had they not had to start overtime down a man). Live, learn, move on.