1. Au Revoir
That’s how you close out a series.
After taking a 2-0 lead in their Round 1 matchup with Montreal on home ice, the Caps traveled north of the border and put up perhaps their most embarrassing effort of the season in Game 3. That stinker had everything – bad penalties (and worse penalty kills), soul-crushing boners, no composure or poise, a goalie injury and utter nonsense on and off the ice (by which we mean onto the bench).
And yet, as we noted at the time, it was one game. Compartmentalized. Flushed.
The Caps rebounded in Game 4 with their best defensive effort of the series, a disciplined display punctuated by a massive momentum shifter and terrific goaltending, and withstood the anticipated Montreal push at the outset of Game 5 before calmly taking care of business (particularly – gasp! – on special teams).
Boom. Handshakes.
It’s hard to overstate the turn-around from Game 3 to Games 4 and 5, but the score- and venue-adjusted five-on-five numbers paint the picture:
The Caps locked in and tightened up where they needed to:
Interesting graphic here by SN.
— Greg Young (@gregyoung.bsky.social) April 30, 2025 at 8:52 PM
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Add to that a 2-for-2 penalty kill and a 2-for-3 power play in Game 5 (including The Captain getting things started), and you have the kind of professional closeout that hasn’t exactly been a hallmark of the Alex Ovechkin Era.
Ultimately, the East’s top regular-season team did what they set out to do en route to the “gentleman’s sweep.” Most importantly, they didn’t let a single bad game snowball into anything more than that – an anomaly, a bump in the road. Good coaching and good on-ice execution is rarely about getting everything right all the time and is more often about adequately addressing what went wrong when it almost inevitably does. As we wrote at the time:
For the Caps, nothing worked [in Game 3] – not their puck management, not their physicality, not either unit of their special teams, not their goaltending, not their team defense. But that was Friday night and Game 4 starts at 0-0. Where it goes from there is up to them.
Where it went was on to Round 2.
2. Power Surge(?)
Perhaps most surprising in Game 5’s closeout win was the Caps getting not one but two power play goals after an 0-for-5 Game 4 and an 0-for-9 run dating back to Alex Ovechkin’s Game 1 series-opening score. And it wasn’t surprising in a “well, there’s statistical variance and when you have something that is 20-25 percent successful, you’re gonna hit random cold snaps like this” sort of way, but rather as in “the power-play has been so ineffective that it’s not even really due for regression.”
Here’s what the power-play looked like through four games:
But then Game 5 happened and fixed everything, right?
Not so fast. Then two faceoffs happened and the Caps were able to capitalize:
Those count too, of course, but the Caps’ power play still struggled mightily to enter the zone under control and generate any offense other than off an offensive-zone faceoff win or quick recovery of an OZ loss, as evidenced by their zero-shots-on-goal early in the second period. At this point, the Caps’ actual power-play goals are outpacing their expected goals, so if regression is coming, it’s not a good thing.
We’ll have plenty of time to talk about special teams in the days ahead, but it’s hard to see the Caps being competitive against Carolina without dramatically improving their performance in non-even-strength situations. Time to get to coachin’, Coach.
3. Decent Enough
You can’t say enough about Logan Thompson’s performance in Games 4 and 5 (and, for that matter, Games 1 and 2), but over the next few days we may well try. Thompson’s .923 save percentage is second in the playoffs so far, and his goals saved above expectation (5.6) is tops among goalies still in the tourney.
Let’s drill down by location (via NHL Edge). First, high-danger:
Okay, he’s “below 50th” there, but the saves and shots faced are right on the averages, save percentage a tick below (and the Caps are allowing all-situation high-danger shots at the lowest rate in the League, second-lowest at five-on-five). Still perfectly cromulent. Mid-range? Exceptional:
One mid-range goal allowed on 40 shots. Only Freddie Andersen has him beat there. And long-range?
You really can’t ask for much more than that. Literally. (The shots-faced here is relatively high – second most in the League in all-situation low-danger shots allowed – but you’ll certainly take that coupled with the lowest rate on high-danger over the opposite).
We said before the series that it was hard to see a way the Caps lose this series if they get decent-enough goaltending, barring the truly unforeseeable (and perhaps unimaginable). Logan Thompson was “decent enough” and then some in Round 1. If he can be as good in Round 2, the Caps have every chance of seeing how good he can be in Round 3.
The journey continues#ALLCAPS pic.twitter.com/rq29JfsYLX
— Washington Capitals (@Capitals) May 1, 2025