Postgame Notebook 3-22-13: Caps 6, Jets 1
Posted on March 23, 2013No Jet Lag For Caps – The Capitals came to Winnipeg for a two-game
set with the Jets needing four points. Thanks to Friday’s 6-1 jolting of the
Jets, the Caps will depart Manitoba on Saturday morning for New York with each
of those four points safely tucked in the cargo area of the team plane.
After an authoritative 4-0 shutout of the Jets on Thursday,
the Caps knew the Jets would come out angry and hard in the first, and Winnipeg
did try to establish a physical tone early. It certainly wasn’t in Washington’s
game plan to give the Jets a pair of power play opportunities early in the
first while the game was still scoreless, but the Caps came closer to lighting
the lamp during those four minutes than the Jets did.
Brooks Laich tore off on a shorthanded breakaway – his
second in as many nights – just after defenseman Steve Oleksy was seated in the
penalty box, but that turned out to be one of the few saves Jets goaltender
Ondrej Pavelec made in the game.
“The PK definitely stepped up,” says Caps forward Matt
Hendricks. “[Goalie Braden Holtby] is our number one PKer; obviously we all
know that. I think we went through six forwards there and probably four
defensemen, maybe five. Everybody got a chance at it and it worked out. It’s
good. We need that confidence.”
Laich ended up giving the Caps a 1-0 lead at the 12:10 mark
of the first when he notched his first tally of the year. Oleksy kept the puck
alive in the Jets end with a smart pinch up the right wing wall. Laich then
beat Jets defenseman Dustin Byfuglien to the puck in the left corner, canceled
Byfuglien and left the disc for linemate Mike Ribeiro. Ribeiro carried behind
the net as Laich skated to the left dot. Ribeiro put it on a tee and Laich
drove it home to give the Caps a lead they would not relinquish.
Less than four minutes later, the Jets nearly drew even when
an Evander Kane shot clicked off the iron, and then Holtby made a stop on
another Kane bid. Winnipeg kept the pressure on down low in the Washington end,
but Caps winger Troy Brouwer was able to get a stick on it and push it up
toward the Caps’ line.
Brouwer then scooped up the puck and tore off on a 2-on-1
with Ribeiro. Brouwer gained the zone, passed to Ribeiro and then opened up for
the one-timer. Again, Ribeiro put it on a tee for Brouwer and he banged it past
Pavelec to give the Caps a 2-0 first-period lead for the second time in as many
nights.
“Our first period wasn’t great,” says Caps coach Adam Oates.
“We got a couple bounces that we didn’t necessarily deserve. [We had] a couple
of stabs at the puck there. we got a 2-on-1 and obviously Troy gave it to Ribs
and a great play for the goal.”
With the Caps owning a multiple-goal lead for the third time
in as many visits to MTS Centre, the Jets badly needed the next goal. Winnipeg
got its third power play chance of the night late in the first, but again it
could not covert. Washington’s fourth line scored a crucial goal early in the
second when Matt Hendricks dumped the puck deep in the Jets end. Joel Ward
outraced the Jets’ defense to the puck and sauced a backhand pass to the front
to set up a Jay Beagle one-timer goal from in tight.
“Obviously these are big games,” says Beagle. “If you’re
going to win big games, you’re going to have to rely on your third and fourth
line to chip in every once in a while and play some big minutes – especially in
back-to-back [games] – to give relief to the top two lines that play a lot of
minutes.
“We knew we had to do a job and we went out there and kept
chipping away at it and we got rewarded tonight.”
It was at this juncture – 5:50 of the second – that Jets
coach Claude Noel went to the bullpen for backup goalie Al Montoya. Pavelec,
who has started 20 of the Jets’ last 21 games, got the rest of the night off.
Caps captain Alex Ovechkin baptized Montoya on the first
shot the relief ‘tender faced, a wrist rocket that came after the Jets turned
the puck over in neutral ice. Ovechkin’s 14th goal of the season
gave the Caps a 4-0 lead.
Washington continued to frustrate the Jets in all three
zones, and the MTS Centre crowd became testy, surly and sarcastic in turns.
The lengthy shutout spell that Caps goalie Braden Holtby
held over the Jets was finally broken in the third when Byfuglien banked a shot
of Green’s skate and into the Washington net to make it 5-1.
Ovechkin scored a late power-play goal off a pretty passing
play in which four different Caps had the puck and moved it to Ovechkin’s
wheelhouse with a series of crisp passes.
“I thought our guys did a great job,” says Laich. “We looked
very controlled, very clean. We didn’t give them much. They exerted a lot of
energy in the first but after that I thought we controlled the game really
well.”
Streak Stopped – Holtby had pitched two shutouts over the
Jets at MTS Centre in a span of just 19 days. He was only about 10 minutes shy
of a third whitewash in Winnipeg when Byfuglien bounced the puck in off Green’s
skate to break Holtby’s shutout spell over the Jets.
The Caps goalie blanked Winnipeg for a total of 190 minutes
and 37 seconds dating back to late in the second period of the Jet’s 4-2 win
over Washington on Jan. 22 of this year.
Baker’s Dozen – Byfuglien’s goal ended a run in which
Washington had scored 13 unanswered goals against the jets over a span of four
contests this season.
Climbing The Charts – With his two-goal night and his
three-goal, five-point stopover in Winnipeg, Ovechkin has quietly climbed to 22nd
in the NHL’s scoring ledger with 29 points (15 goals, 14 assists).
Ovechkin is tied for seventh in the league in goals and he
leads the circuit with 10 power-play goals.
Scoring Spread – Fourteen of Washington’s 18 skaters picked up at least a point
in the game, including five of the Capitals’ six defensemen.
No Caps player was a minus player in the game; 14 players
earned plus ratings while four were even. Oleksy and Laich led the way at
plus-3 each.
Three Score – When Oates took over as Caps coach last
summer, he convened an informal leadership council among four of Washington’s
longest tenured players: Ovechkin, Green, Laich and Nicklas Backstrom.
Friday night’s game in Winnipeg marked the first time that
any three of those four players has scored in the same game in more than two
years, since a 5-2 win over the Lightning in Tampa Bay on Feb. 4, 2011.
In that win over the Bolts, Backstrom scored twice while
Ovechkin and Laich added single tallies.
Southeast Swagger -- The Capitals are now 9-3-0 against Southeast Division opponents this season and they are 6-1-0 on the road within their division. All six of Washington's road wins in 2012-13 have come against divisional opponents, and half of those have been earned in Winnipeg.
The Ladder – With only four Eastern Conference teams in
action on Friday night, Washington made a quantum leap from 13th to
10th in the Eastern Conference standings by virtue of its victory
over the Jets. The Caps have drawn within three points of eighth-place Carolina
in the Eastern Conference standings and they now trail front-running Winnipeg
by five points in the chase for the Southeast Division title.
Washington’s final stop on its current four-game road tour
is in New York where it will face the Rangers on Sunday. With a regulation win
over the Blueshirts, the Caps would move to within a point of New York in the
standings.
Tenth place is nothing to aspire to, but it is Washington’s
high-water mark of the season in the conference standings, and the Caps still
have 17 games remaining with which to improve upon that standing.
Hit This – According to the official scoresheets of the
three games played between the Caps and Winnipeg at MTS Centre this season, the
Jets outhit the Caps by a combined total of 104-46 in those games.
According to the same scoresheets, the Caps outscored the
Jets 13-1 in those same three games.
Down On The Farm – The AHL Hershey Bears embarked on a
crucial three-games-in-three-nights journey through New England this weekend.
The Bears were in Hartford on Friday night to take on the Connecticut Whale.
Hershey dropped a 3-2 skills competition decision to the
Whale in the first of its trio of games on this busy weekend.
Nicolas Deschamps (first goal as a Bear) and Ryan Potulny
scored for Hershey and Philipp Grubauer made 26 saves in goal for the Bears.
Hershey heads to Manchester on Saturday and Worcester on
Sunday. The Bears are now in eighth place in the AHL’s Eastern Conference, one
point behind the seventh-place Whale.
Down a level, the ECHL Reading Royals opened their weekend’s
action with a 3-1 road win in Evansville. David Vallorani scored twice and
Stanislav Galiev scored his 20th goal of the season to support the
27-save efforts of Mark Owuya in the Reading cage.
The Royals play in Toledo on Saturday and Sunday in their
final two road games of the 2012-13 regular season. Reading now holds a
four-point lead over second-place Cincinnati in the ECHL’s Eastern Conference.
The Royals have four regular season games remaining.
By The Numbers – Defenseman John Carlson was the only member
of the Caps to crack the 20-minute mark in ice time on Friday. He skated 22:37
against the Jets … Ovechkin accounted for a quarter (six of 24) of Washington’s
shots on goal and its attempted shots (10 of 40) in the game … Green and
Carlson led the way with three blocked shots each … Washington won 28 of 47
face-offs (60%) in the game, led by Laich’s 9-for-13 (69%) night … Winnipeg’s
Evander Kane led all skaters on both sides with 23:37 in ice time … Fifteen of
Winnipeg’s 18 skaters had a minus next to their names at game’s end.
