Treading water

I can't say as I went into last night's Caps game with high expectations, or anything.  And the first two shifts did nothing to raise them, as most of both shifts were spent playing defense.  But then Perreault's line came out and moved play in the the right direction, so it felt a little better.

It was back and forth for a bit, then the Caps started to get the better of the play.

But nobody could find the net for the rest of the period (both goalies were excellent).

In the second period, things went far more Ottawa's way.  There weren't a whole lot of shots, but the Senators had a comfortable margin of them.  And one of those Borealic shots went off of Karlsson's stick, and was deflected past Neuwirth by Silfverberg.

The third period was almost all Neuwirth, as the Caps were completely dominated (to the tune of 23-4 in shots, likely with a healthy helping of blocked shots as well, although I don't have the breakdown on those).  The only reason it wasn't completely Neuvy was that MarJo sprung OV behind the defense (helped by a bit of a misplay by the defender who had a chance to cut off the pass), and OV put it behind Anderson to tie the game up.

That was as good as it got for the Caps.  As I implied, Neuvy held the fort enough to keep Ottawa from extending or retaking the lead, and it went into overtime.  Ribeiro didn't help matters by taking two bad penalties in the third (one of which carried over into the OT).  In the overtime session, the Caps couldn't finish killing that penalty, and hence, never even got a shot off.

As I said, my expectations on the night weren't high, so I can't say as they really disappointed me, but I certainly had hopes of more.  Mostly, I'm just hoping it was a bit of a blip, because twenty shots a game just isn't going to get it done.

But the game didn't have any real meaning for the Caps, so it's hard to read anything into it.  I just ended up hoping that Saturday's Boston game would go better.