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Morning After: Midtown Mayhem

Some morning-after thoughts as the Caps stumble out of the break with a 5-1 loss to the Rangers at MSG.

Photo courtesy of the Washington Capitals

The Caps put together something of a reverse hangover game last night, starting out strong before slowly imploding about halfway through. After Anthony Mantha’s opening tally, the Rangers struck back – quickly and often – with goals by K’Andre Miller, Artemi Panarin and Braden Schneider over a roughly five-minute span to put the game out of reach.

As a result, they picked up their first regulation loss when scoring the first goal of the game, and failed to gain ground on an Islander team that got pummeled by the Penguins while the Caps were taking their own thrashing.

Three Takeaways:

  • Spencer Carbery shook his lines up in the third period, moving Alex Ovechkin next to Evgeny Kuznetsov and Ivan Miroshnichenko. While the move ultimately had little impact on the game’s outcome, it did result in what had to have been Miroshnichenko’s best scoring chance yet, only to have it robbed by countryman Igor Shesterkin. Kid’s getting close to getting his first goal, though.
  • Igor Shesterkin turned aside 26 of the 27 shots he faced from the Caps last night, and while there were a few nice saves and one or two robberies thrown in there, the Caps really didn’t make him work hard enough on most of those saves. This is not the heat map of a team that’s making the goalie have to look through traffic or battle for sight lines:
  • Darcy Kuemper didn’t really do much to steal this one but it’s hard to pin much of this on him, either, as he got very little help in front of him from around that fateful midpoint of the second period on. And even if he had done more, hard to win too many games when you only score one goal.

They said it:

Talking Points