"A good, old-fashioned spanking," Torts called it. I...can't really come up with a better phrase. We took a 2-0 series lead back home and got messed the hell up. There's not a lot of good to take from this game. The Caps came out the same as they have in the last 2 games, but a little hungrier. We looked like me in my weekly ice skating class compared to them.
At the very least, this was an opportunity to lose to the best player in the world, who reminded me a great deal in this game of one Jaromir Jagr of our recent past, stepping up and carrying an entire playoff game on his back.
Not that Ovechkin was alone - Alexander Semin and Nicklas Backstrom both delivered performances that will make any Ranger fan nauseated. But Ovechkin was, as Brooks called him, "unconquerable." On both ends of the ice. His lack of goals in the series shouldn't fool you - last night, he was a star.
That said, not all is lost, because this isn't entirely different than the way the Caps showed up for games 1 and 2. The big difference was the New York Rangers. We came out flat and embarrassing. Mark Staal provided the executive summary:
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I don't think it was so much them as much as it was us: we were standing around kinda watching a lot, circling, turning our backs, and against that team, they'll pass it around you, cycle it around you. So from the start, I don't know what it was, but we were kind of hesitant to play D-zone coverage well enough to keep them off the board.
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"I don't think it was so much them as much as it was us." Exactly. There are a lot of things we could blame - not just Ovechkin. We could blame the officiating. After all, as Brooks put it, "The Dave Jackson-Kelly Sutherland referee pair made it its business to eliminate Sean Avery from the game by whistling him into oblivion. Mission accomplished." Meanwhile, Ovechkin broke Rozsival's nose by hitting him in the face with a stick, for no call at all (Vs. (possibly rightly) excused it by showing multiple angles and saying "you're supposed to be in control of your stick, but the referees will let it go if it's a follow through," while TSN claimed it was a puck that hit him in the face, and not a stick at all). But Torts's answer was the important thing: "I mean, penalties were called. I'm not sure what they were. That really wasn't an indicator of how we played. So, I'm not gonna whine about penalties. We stunk. Simple."
We could blame excellent goaltending from the opposition, like we used to in the regular season, and like we no doubt would have if we had played the same exact game to lose by the same exact score to Jose Theodore last night. But it's hard to make that argument when a 20-year-old is playing his 7th and 8th NHL games ever, his first-ever NHL playoff games, his first NHL games of the season, and two NHL games in the row for the first time. And then he lets in one goal on 57 shots.
We could blame the Caps as a whole for stepping their game up, like many "experts" are doing now. But I'm having some trouble buying that. In each of the first two games, the Caps put 35 shots on Hank, and in the third, they only raised that to 40. In the first two games, they had 23.5 hits on us, and in Game 3, they had 24. In blocked shots, which is a stat that NHL TV specifically used to prove that the Caps had stepped it up significantly, they had 10 in Game 1 and 13 in Game 2. They had 13 in Game 3. That's....not "stepping it up."
Indeed, the only Caps stat that has changed significantly over the course of the series is faceoffs, of which they won 70% in Game 1 and have only won 53% since then. To summarize, it is not statistically justifiable that the Caps have significantly improved their gameplay over the 3 games. They have started to look a little sharper, sure, but mostly, it's by comparison.
The Rangers, meanwhile, have fallen off significantly. In Game 1, we beat the Caps at their own game, and in Game 2, we tightened up and beat them at ours. In Game 3, we failed to play our game, and we let them play theirs. We reverted to February hockey, getting 11 more shots on goal than the average of our previous two games, but most were from the outside. Meanwhile, having blocked an average of 25 shots in each of our first two games, we blocked only 13 this time around. Since scoring 2 PPG in 8:00 of PP time in Game 1, we've been stymied for 18:16 of PP time. There's no one we can really blame but ourselves.
In the game of puck possession, we were the losers. No question. We've been losing that game all series. It had to matter eventually, but there are real differences. In Game 1, we took advantage of every opportunity, on a weak Theodore. Last night, in the first 11 and a half minutes, we had two wide open nets that we failed to bury the puck into - the second of which, Callahan's, was particularly egregious and also led directly to the Caps' second goal. Talk about a momentum shift. In Game 2, we tightened up defensively, and despite not having a ton of possession time to show for it, when we couldn't play a solid game of keep-away, at least we played some fantastic get-in-the-way. Last night, we didn't have the defensive chops to keep it up.
A reporter asked Torts why his team didn't come to the arena with the jump they needed, and he said something about the jump not being all they were missing. Like what?
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I thought we were terrible defensively. As I said, I think a very important part of trying to compete in this series is having the puck. You're not gonna have the puck if you play defense like we played tonight. To create offense, you need to be sound defensively, and we weren't. We weren't even close.
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That's the long and the short of it. Time to, as Torts put it, "take our medicine." But let's talk personnel for a second.
First of all, Bruce Bo-French-Name did an excellent job in keeping Varlamov in. The kid seems immune to all the nervousness you'd expect out of a Garden, playoff, Sean Avery, 20-year-old type situation. And with the currently-NHL-playoff-best .982 save percentage and 0.5 GAA the Rangers have granted him, expect to see more of Simeon Varlamov, at least until we give Boudreau a reason to pull him.
As for the rest of the Caps, we've covered it: Ovechkin, Semin, Backstrom = bad news. Keep them contained. Let's move on to us. Chris Drury. I like the guy, and this is the time of the season when we need him most. But he has a goddamn broken hand. And as much of a warrior as he is for staying in and playing through it, he just hasn't been helpful the ways we need him to, which are big plays in front of the net and faceoffs. Those are what he does. In 15:25 of ice time in Game 2, he hit a guy once and blocked 3 shots, but he only took one shot (it missed the net), and he went 1 for 2 on faceoffs. In 10:58 of ice time in Game 3, he did nothing (shots, faceoffs, hits, blocks - nothing) but be on the ice for the Caps' second goal (he was the man supposed to pick up Semin) and in the box for their third. I think he's a great hockey player, and I love that he wants to play. But if Drury-with-a-broken-hand is less effective than Voros, then Voros should get the start in favor of Drury-with-a-broken-hand.
Yeah, Sean Avery got a little frustrated last night. But you would have too, if you'd been a marked man from minute one as obviously as he was. They keep showing that goalie interference call, and I keep rubbing my eyes and going "huh?" NHL TV even used the clip of that call to talk about how out-of-control Avery is, taking 3 minor penalties in the second like that. Weird that no one said anything about Naslund's 3 minors in Game 2.
The $11-million-dollar men didn't play too much worse than our other pairings last night, which I guess could be considered a good thing? There were errors from everyone. None of our back 6 seemed to be able to hold a puck once they got it. They all got to pucks, but none of them knew what to do with them.
I can't get on Callahan's case too badly for the wide-open miss, but it sure would have been nice if he'd buried that. Also, I need more from everyone named Nik.
As usual when we give up this many, Lundqvist was blameless.
That's the long and the short of it. We sucked. Tomorrow night, we need to suck less. Tomorrow night is the difference between going into the last 3 games of the series only having to win 1 and returning to Washington for the start of a best-of-3. That sounds like the difference between winning a series and losing one. Let's see what happens tomorrow night.
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