20120213

Better Late than Never?

Yesterday's game started off on the wrong foot, with me not having the recording set. Fortunately, I went to turn it on pretty quickly after it started and only missed ten minutes or so. How did that go for the Caps? Not great, as they appeared to be getting outplayed by quite a bit. The silver lining was that there was no score, so they were far from out of it.

And they were generating a few chances of their own, at least.

But I ended up pretty irriitated at the whole game. The one strength of this team, under Coach Hunter, has been their ability to avoid giving up odd-man rushes. Really, that's been the only bright spot that might be attributed to the coach (the other bright spot being that the goaltending has rebounded to about where we expected it to be). And how did that go, yesterday? I saw either three or four 2-on-1's yesterday (the last one was on a power play in the third, and who was the one? That would be OV. There's no doubt about him having a lot of skills, but he's still just about the last player on the team you'd want back for that. As you'd expect, that turned out to be the winning goal).

How did Neuvy do, in goal? Very well, actually; the winning goal was the only odd-man rush on which the Rangers scored. All three of the goals would have been fantastic saves, if he had been able to make them. And he did make a few more fantastic saves to keep the team in the game.

One small (very small, actually) bright spot was that they did show appropriate desperation once they were down by a pair, which led to some great offensive zone shifts. That was the sort of play we want to see when they're tied, or up. You know, keeping play in the offensive zone.

But they still ended up behind on shots for the game, only having a slight edge in the third (you know, when they were down by two).

So, all in all, it was a pretty irritating game to watch. There were some nice moments, particularly Semin's sniping of the top corner for the first goal, and some of the saves. But it completely failed as evidence that things are headed in the right direction with this team.

And San Jose is coming to town tonight. Now would be a very good time to refute that statement, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

On the personnel front, Green is starting to skate, and Knuble has now been a healthy scratch in the last two games. I hope the team is doing something with him like they did with Sarge, because getting scratched in favor of Aucoin and Beagle is not a sign that team management is happy with you. Or that you have a future with the team. We'll see what happens, I guess.

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