20111203

Senators flee capital

Tonight's Caps/Sens game was pretty entertaining. The Caps were outplayed in the first, but dominated in the second. So, of course, the Caps got the only goal of the first, while the Sens got the only tally in the second. The Caps also dominated for about the first seventeen minutes of the third, but both teams ended up putting one in the net.

Overtime continued to be very good for the Caps, though, as Laich cleanly won the draw back to Alzner. Karl pushed it up the Chimera breaking in. Karlsson losing an edge made it a two-on-one break with Laich, and Chimmer gave a nice feed across to Laich for the score. Total time? Twelve seconds.

So Laich had the game-winning goal in his 500th career game. Ignoring injuries, Laich is under contract for another 450 or so games for the Caps, so we don't have to worry whether he'll have the game winner for his 1000th. Still, bully for him, and we'll hope for a bunch more GWGs over that 450.

So, how did they look? Mostly quite good. They weren't getting outworked regularly. The breakout was mostly pretty good (although there were several breakdowns at the end of the game). They made Ottawa work to get their own breakout going. There was only one penalty against. There were 35 shots on goal; a nice improvement. Ottawa had the edge on giveaways, but it was quite close.

The power play still wasn't very good; the first two looked bad, while the third looked good. I don't remember the fourth. The third was actually pretty long, too, because they had a long 6-on-5 (about 50 seconds) while that penalty was delayed.

I can't remember too much of the penalty kill. The first shift looked pretty good, but I can't remember anything specific about the rest. Most importantly, they definitely didn't allow a goal.

So Hunter got his first win, the game was still low-scoring, and there were several more encouraging signs. We'll see a little bit more on Monday in Florida.

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