Penguin-tentury

My DVR let me down a bit in Sunday's matinee matchup between the Caps and Pens. Part of that is my fault; I kept forgetting to set it, since it was on NBC. And part of it wasn't; the game ran long, so the DVR stopped recording with four minutes left.

Anyway, because of the first problem, I missed almost the entire first period (the Pens were already up 2-0), including why MarJo wasn't playing. The rest of that period did not look any better, with the Penguins carrying just about all of the play. I was slightly tempted to turn the game off, since it was feeling like a continuation of the Hurricanes game from the other night.

But I resisted the temptation, and the Caps put together a very nice second period. They weren't dominating the second nearly as much as the Pens did the first, but they managed to match the scoring, evening it at two. It was also a very chippy period, with the Caps refusing to be pushed around. There were a number of questionable hits, but not many calls on them.

One that was weird was Malkin tripping Alzner (man, Malkin is dirty; it's really jumped out at me the last two times the Caps have played the Pens). They claimed that the trip wasn't called because the whistle had already been blown. I'm sure that's true, but what difference does it make whether the whistle has blown, or not? Doesn't that make it, if anything, even worse? It certainly sets a horrible precedent.

Anyway, things were looking pretty good, and started looking even better when, a minute into the third, Perreault created some space for Semin and OV. As you'd expect, those two converted. But things went back to more normal when, six minutes later, the Pens scored again to tie the game up.

The Pens mostly dominated play again for the rest of the period, but Neuvy kept the team in the game.

And, as I said, the DVR gave up with four minutes left, so I missed the end of the third and all of overtime. So I'm not sure what happened that had the Pens scoring with the only shot of overtime.

In the end, I'm not sure how I feel about the game. It's definitely disappointing to lose after leading early in the third. On the other hand, with the way the first went, I didn't expect the Caps to tie the game, let alone get a lead. And at least they got a standings point.

But it's hard to be happy with things, when the Caps were heavily dominated for most of the game. I'm just not feeling good about where this team is heading.

One small thing that I noticed was a problem on the power play (which looked pretty bad until the power play that ended up being a 5-on-3). But a weakness they ended up with, when they did get set up, was that they needed a lefty on the right half-wall (Backstrom's normal spot, of course). A couple of times, they got the puck over there in great shape for a shot, but whoever was in that position (I forgot to take note) couldn't take the one-timer because of the handedness issue. They did end up scoring, but it ruined several good opportunities. I hope we're not going to see that happen again.

That's about it for yesterday. Next up is... how shall we put it? A large challenge, with the Bruins coming to Washington. Not feeling good about that at all. Ick. I'm just going to keep my fingers crossed that they can find a way to get a point, because I don't think they've got more than a one in four chance of actually winning.