Collecting Leafs

The Caps put together a pretty good game tonight against the Leafs. They let in a slightly fluky goal in the first, got three of their own in the second, and seemed to be cruising until four minutes into the third. Then, they let in three goals in as many minutes to lose the lead.

But Semin atoned for some earlier stupid (well, to be fair to him, I couldn't believe either of them got called after looking at the replays; they were very weak calls) penalties by getting the tying goal seven minutes later. In overtime, the Caps got quite a few nice chances, but still couldn't convert. But OV and Semin scored in the shootout for the win.

A few notes: I think they might have had a plan against Neuvy, in that they seemed to be going almost all blocker side. The first goal was definitely scored that way, but the bigger issue was that he was giving up more rebounds than usual, and I suspect that that is why. In any event, two of the latter goals, I believe, were scored off of rebounds.

Otherwise, the Caps had a number of other chances (OV and Backstrom actually failed to convert a 2-on-1 breakaway, although it took a very good save to prevent it. Actually, it looked in real time like Backstrom had missed the wide-open net, but on replay we could see that Gustavsson managed to get the flat of his stick on it and barely deflect it past the net). And Knuble was a beast; he didn't show up on the score sheet, but he had a number of very good tries, causing havok for the Leafs defense.

Fahey again looked decent. Not great, but not embarassingly bad; we'll hope that's a sign of improvement.

Flash's numbers looked pretty good, although I thought he failed to do anything on what should have been a couple of good scoring chances (plus, he got in the way of Laich a time or two).

I guess we'll see what happens with the Bruins on Friday. Hopefully, Poti will be back. We'll also hope Thomas starts seriously coming back to earth (he was slacking tonight, allowing two goals on only 35 shots); he's due for some pretty fierce regression to the mean.

Update: I forgot to mention that Neuvirth won Rookie of the Month for October, so congratulations to him for that. I also forgot to mention, in Knuble doing well, he forced Schenn (D) to save the puck from the goal line twice only about 30 seconds into the game.