Capitals 4, Rangers 0

So I'm back-blogging. I just got back from a hockey weekend in DC. We all know how it turned out. Let's start with Friday night.

I know I usually like to start with the good news. Well, Friday night, the good news was pretty much: Ryan Callahan passed me a puck over the glass at practice. From there, it was all downhill. Steckel beat Dubinsky on the opening faceoff, and it seemed like we didn't get the puck back until the third period started. Unusually, the King let in a softie: 12 minutes in, a simple shot from 20 feet out that he let slip either threw his pads or between them and the post, to put the Caps up by 2. But blaming Lundqvist for this loss feels a little like blaming Governor Schwarzenegger for his party's poor handling of environmental concerns.

They never had the puck. Through 40 minutes, they just never had the damn puck. The biggest thing that jumped at me was speed. Yes, the Caps are fast. But literally every race was won by a Cap. No matter who it was, no matter how many steps behind they were, no matter who they were racing, they got there first. Yes, we fell back on the standard Rangers don't-know-what-to-do-with-the-puck. Zherdev looked positively awful every time he touched the puck. But more than that, it was speed. Speed is what makes Redden's game so inexcusable - there is *always* a beat in which he stops to make a decision once he gets the puck. In that time, everyone else has moved. He's like the exact opposite of Wayne Gretzky: he reacts to where everyone used to be.

As you know, you don't win games if you don't score goals, you don't score goals if you don't take shots, and you can't take shots if you never have the puck. So, through 40 minutes, we had only even seen fit to hit the net 10 times (and we had won only 37.5% of faceoffs). Oh, and it was 4-0 Caps. Weird, right?

So, we did the only natural thing we could to fix the problem: We pulled Lundqvist.

Okay, reasonably speaking, I know that we didn't pull him 'cause we thought it was his fault. There was no reason to leave him in while the Caps smelled blood, rest him for the next game, etc. And, as it turned out, for the third period, we started to play some hockey. Got me a little excited, even. Another 10 shots on goal in the third alone. But, it was already 4-0 Caps. So guess what happened. We lost 4-0.

I'd go through a rundown of personnel, but there's no one really to speak of. Every skater was slow, every skater was bad. Except, of course, Sean Avery. He...wasn't present. Torts benched him. Presumably, this was for the 2 penalties he took in the last 10 minutes of game 4. I guess this actually brings me to one more piece of good news that came out of this game.

Standing down by the ice during the pre-game warmup, when I learned that Avery was being scratched, I was talking to some Ranger fans standing around, and I really really wished that I could come up with the perfect real-life analogue for "biting off your nose to spite your face." And I had nothing, and I could not be witty. Now, after the game, I do have the perfect analogue: Game 5 of that Rangers-Caps first-round series, when Tortorella scratched Avery.

Look, I'm not gonna try to claim that we would have won game 5 if one guy had been there. And as you know, I absolutely think Avery has no justification for the lack of discipline he showed. But...maybe, I dunno, sit him for a period? Send a message? Don't take a guy that is consistently one of your best offensive players off the ice in a game where you know your biggest weakness is obviously going to be scoring goals?

Whatever. At the end of the day, every skater out there was accountable. And to try to pin it on just one decision is ridiculous. If anyone's to blame, it's me. I haven't seen a win live since November 17, 2007, in overtime. I haven't seen a regulation win since we swept the Thrashers in the first round of the '06-'07 playoffs.

At the end of the day, I feel like as an overall game, this 4-0 loss was worse for us than the 4-0 loss from Game 3. However, we showed some promise at the end of the game, taking the fight to them. I wonder what would happen if we ever put forth an effort for 60 minutes.