Well, two very disappointing nights in a row for the Caps. They spotted the opposition a couple of goals, came back, but failed to secure a win both times.
The first could very reasonably be blamed on the officiating, and the goal that was called back for no apparent reason. After watching the replay on that a number of times, I can't figure out why they decided to wash it out.
In any event, going down by a bunch is certainly no recipe for success, no matter how good you are, so perhaps they deserved it.
The only small bit of consolation is that they scored five in each of the games, which is enough to get them to a four goal per game average. And the hat tricks in three consecutive games is kind of neat (Ovie, Laich, and Semin, in order), especially without any hat tricks in the previous fifty-eight games. But we'd definitely rather have the wins.
I hope they'll use the Olympic break to get back in sync, because they've definitely been out of sync overall for the last several games.
And as an update to my previous post, I did a bit more searching for teams averaging four goals a game late into the season. The '06-07 Sabres got closer than the aforementioned Red Wings, with 222 goals through sixty games. And the '05-06 Sens were even better than those Red Wings, with nine more on the season, and managed to keep that four goal/game average through 64 games. In fact, through 61 games, they were exactly where these Caps are, at 244 goals. I guess we'll see what happens the rest of the way; those Sens ended up with 3.83 goals/game, about .75 over league average that year (though, to be fair, the average that year was about a quarter goal higher than it is this year).
But unless I missed someone else, those are the only three teams to score over 300 goals in a season since the '95-96 Penguins, powered by Lemieux, Jagr, and Francis. That team managed nearly four and a half goals per game in a league averaging π.
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