So, it's kinda hard to get too angry about last night's game. We came into the home of a team that is much better at hockey than we are, missing our best forward. The home team had absolutely everything to prove against us, and at home in Game One against an 8-seed. We played our game as well as we could, the officials stayed the hell out of the way, and we completely held our own. After an almost 80-minute battle, they eventually broke through and scored the tiebreaker. You want it to go the other way, but you can't be super-angry about it.
Yes, the Caps outplayed us for large portions of the game, increasing as time went on. But all that time of possession they had didn't really translate into all that many fantastic scoring chances, and when it did, our defensemen or goalie generally came up big. Guess what, guys: that's how it's gonna go. That's how we're gonna win these games, if we win them. Last night, it's how we lost one. But we still played the only type of game we're gonna win against these guys. If you're asking why Marian Gaborik didn't score 4 goals, and why we didn't beat them 8-1, then you're asking the wrong questions.
Here's an interesting line of questions, though. Did we, over time in overtime, start to look more and more tired, and did that eventually contribute to our giving up the game-winner at the end of the first OT?
I want to give credit where credit is due, here, first: I'm a huge supporter of coach John Tortorella, I think he's done a fantastic job rebuilding this team in the right way since he's taken the helm, and I imagine he may be under consideration for this year's Jack Adams Award. I also largely agree with a point he made in an interview the other day, that the media generally gives coaches too much shit when a team plays badly and too much credit when a team plays well. In the NHL, as they say, many coaches are "hired to be fired."
Now, with that said, there are some things that the coaches do control, and that they should rightly be held accountable for. Let's make a bold assumption, that the Rangers' fate could have been different last night if they hadn't been so damn exhausted by the end of the OT period. One could certainly argue that fatigue was not a factor last night, but I think it was. I think that regularly good Rangers just didn't have it in them anymore, and throughout the OT, Caps' possession time kept on increasing, until it was hard not to see the game-winner coming.
If that was the problem, we have to ask why. The Caps had played exactly as long a game as the Rangers had, why didn't they get as tired? One possible explanation is conditioning, but I don't buy it. Players have often identified Torts's training regimen, starting at training camp, as the hardest they've experienced in the pros. Alex Ovechkin aside, I find it highly unlikely that the Capitals are just more in-shape than the Rangers.
Outside of this run-on sentence, I will spare you my opinions (which you already know) on how I think a guy like Sean Avery (a healthy scratch yet again) might have been a difference-maker in a physical, 80-minute hockey game that the Rangers got too fatigued to win, as opposed to Mats Zuccarello's seven minutes and thirty-four seconds of forgettable ice time; but it's worth noting that that healthy scratches are a coaching decision.
The most obvious thing to blame here is Torts's propensity to lean on his top guys inordinately. Understand: he's absolutely right about who those top guys are. It's very hard to argue with the theory that, in an overtime period in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, I'd rather have Marc Staal on the ice than Matt Gilroy; I'd rather Brandon Dubinsky than Erik Christensen. But that doesn't mean you can lean exclusively on those guys you'd prefer, all game long, every game. That starts to take its toll, especially in, as Joe Beninati called them last night, "grownup overtimes."
Last night, John Erskine got the least ice time of all Caps defensemen, with 18:44. After that, the Washington D's ice time ranged from 23:42 to 28:39. Meanwhile, even if you throw out outlier Matt Gilroy (who got 16:22, almost two-and-a-half minutes less than Erskine), the Rangers' D ranged from 20:08 to 33:14.
In fact, if you don't include John Erskine, the average Capital defenseman deviated from the average defensive ice time of his team by only 1:53. Even including Erskine, that figure is only 2:39. Meanwhile, even without Gilroy, the average Ranger defenseman deviated from his team's average defensive ice time by 4:14. Including Gilroy, by 5:08.
Which of these teams is the one that wins "by committee," again?
Look, even in a game like last night's, you obviously want to give more ice time to your better guys. I'm not suggesting McCabe's 20:08 should have been as high as Staal's 33:14. Staal is great at stopping other people from scoring goals, so you want him to spend as much time as possible doing that. But maybe a little more balance among the ranks would have led to a little less fatigue down the stretch, and maybe that would have helped.
Or maybe not. Maybe if we'd played McCabe and Gilroy a little more last night, we would have given up the tie-breaker even sooner, because one of them would have done something stupid. It's just something to think about. Anyway, buckle in - if last night's game was any indication, the Rangers are here to play this series for real, and we can expect some more hockey games that look a lot like Game One did. Tomorrow night, we have the chance to even the series and win back home ice. One game at a time; Let's Go Rangers!
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