Jettisoning position

The game started out with great promise, with the Caps completely dominating play through the first period (to the tune of 12-4 on shots, 6-3 on chances). The scoreboard, however, showed nothing had hit the twine. The summary put up showed Hendricks doing great: something like a shot, a hit, and 5 of 7 on draws. Not too much to notice, there, I think, except that that meant that he took almost half the draws for the period (there were 15). I guess Halpern was getting thrown out of pretty much every faceoff for the period.

The second period was pretty even, with chances dead even at 5 and shots 12-11 in favor of the good guys. Again, though, the score remained deadlocked (though the Caps looked very dangerous in their lone power play).

It was the best game for watching in quite a while, though; the Caps were doing a good job of keeping most of the play in the offensive end.

It was in the third when things started to go sideways. The first ten minutes were pretty even, with, perhaps, a slight edge to the Caps. Then the Caps got a power play and scored in ten seconds. A couple of minutes later, they got a double minor, and scored in twelve seconds. The second half of that double minor had about thirty seconds of pretty atrocious play, but didn't allow any damage (and looked pretty good the rest of the two minutes). But then Hamr took a slashing penalty. The PK was looking good, but a minute and change later Laich was called for playing with a broken stick (he stopped a shot with it, and then passed to Brouwer, probably not even realizing that the shot had broken his stick).

And that's when all hell broke loose. Winnipeg had already pulled Pavelec, because of the power play, so now it was 6-on-3, and it was pretty ugly. They held it off for a while, but allowed a goal with only ten or so seconds left on Hamr's penalty. That wasn't too bad, but twelve seconds later, Big Buff took a shot from the red line which caromed off a defender's stick, and took a weird hop right into the net. Total fluke.

The Caps played pretty well the rest of the way, but were unable to solve the riddle of Pavelec, even through overtime. The 18 seconds of power play they got at the end of overtime didn't really help, either, so they went into the gimmick. And yeah, things didn't go so well, there. OV scored, which surprised me, but Semin and Perreault didn't really challenge Ondrej. And TVo didn't get a stop. *sigh*

Anticlimactic end to what had been, to that point, a very good game. I hope they take heart in the sixty minutes (well, 59:48) that they played really well, and can forget about the fluky lapse.

We'll see on Sunday, when they head up to New York to take on the Rangers.