Heading into Game 3, we talked about line matching both generally and specifically. So how’d it play out in two games in Montreal? Here are the five-on-five matchups for the two games (Game 3 on the left, Game 4 on the right):
Just from a quick glance, the chart on the right has a lot more red (good for the Caps), which makes sense – per Natural Stat Trick, the Caps had a five-on-five expected goals percentage of just 33.9% in Game 3 and 63.8% in Game 4.
But what changed in the matchups that precipitated that shift? Let’s take a look at Nick Suzuki’s line and who they faced the most in each game (using centers as proxies for their lines):
In Game 3, Martin St. Louis was able to target the hell out of Dylan Strome (Alex Ovechkin) and duck Pierre-Luc Dubois; in Game 4, there was a much more even split amongst the three non-Lars Eller lines. Why? Did MSL suddenly decide that a matchup that Montreal dominated in Game 3 – to the tune of the Habs garnering 86.3% of expected goals with Suzuki on the ice against Ovechkin – was no longer worth pursuing?
Nope, it was the power plays. Those fruitless wastes of two minutes, those utterly embarrassing 120-second bathroom breaks actually served to throw off the rhythm of the game enough that it threw off Montreal’s ability to target the Ovechkin line as consistently because St. Louis likes to put the Suzuki line out after a penalty kill, and since Ovechkin has just spent a full two minutes doing… things, I guess?… that means Suzuki is facing someone else. Take a look:
What you see there are the shifts for each player in Game 3 (top) and Game 4 (bottom). The light gray represents Caps power plays, light red is Canadiens power plays (weird, they’re mostly shorter…).
Anyway, you can see that in Game 3, in which the Caps only had two power-play opportunities (one was split by the first intermission, which is why it might look like two separate PPs), Suzuki was able to get out against Ovechkin often, particularly when the game was still in doubt, with the exceptions mostly coming in the aftermath of power plays.
For example, here’s a blow up from Game 3 in which you see Suzuki coming on to target the Ovechkin line (what MSL wants to do, on the left) and how a Caps’ power play throws that off for a few shifts (because MSL wants Suzuki out following a Caps’ PP regardless) and how long it takes to get back on that matchup with another Caps’ extra-man advantage thrown in:
Those are the two Caps’ power plays in Game 3 and you can see that St. Louis was able to get the matchups he wanted, for the most part, and he had massive success with it.
In Game 4, the Caps got five power plays and it threw off Montreal’s ability to go after that matchup. But… not entirely. Suzuki still faced Strome more than any other Caps center at fives. But he was way less successful in those minutes – a 78.8% xGF in Game 3 dropped to just 6.1% in Game 4. That’s not a typo. Why? Literally how?
It probably has less to do with Strome and pals and more to do with the blueliners skating behind them. We saw above that Game 3 was a lot (way too much) of Suzuki on the ice against Matt Roy. In Game 4, it was (mercifully) less Roy and more Jakob Chychrun and John Carlson, who seem more capable of slowing down the Canadiens’ top line. Here’s how Spencer Carbery’s lines and pairs shook out in Montreal:
There’s a lot there, but one big takeaway is that in Game 3, Chychrun and Carlson spent a lot of time on the ice with the Dubois line (red) and not much with the Strome line (blue), while the Roy-Sandin pair was with Strome the most. In Game 4, that evened out a bit more, with Strome spending the most time with Chychrun and Dubois on most often with Roy. It was an adjustment that had to be made before Game 4…
Yes, Suzuki's line stole the Ovi line's lunch money last night. However, part of that was having the trio out there with 38-3, which simply has not been working. Here's 38-3-8 in Game 3 (the one game sample) and overall this series (three games), via @naturalstattrick.com
— Japers' Rink (@japersrink.bsky.social) April 26, 2025 at 9:08 AM
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…and it worked.
Arpon Basu had a good piece in The Athletic after Game 4, mostly centering on the Canadiens losing the plot by complaining about the officiating. He’s right, of course, but the quote from that piece that stood out was from Spencer Carbery: “Honestly, I liked how (the matchups) played out a lot.”
If the opposing coach is saying that after a playoff game in your rink, you screwed up. Carbery made adjustments after a woeful Game 3 – not jumbling up his lines or benching players for a single off night, but small, meaningful tweaks – and St. Louis was unable to make counter-adjustments quickly enough. Now the series comes back to Washington and Carbery will be able to get his preferred matchups even more easily. Hopefully he likes how they play out as much as he did after Game 4.