Caps update

I've been falling behind quite a lot on the Caps, lately.  Most of which is my fault, for sure.

The short of it is that they're near the top of the league in possession stats (Corsi and Fenwick, 5-on-5), but not doing so great, lately, converting that possession into goals differential.  I'd put money on that coming around, though.  I think they'll just be just fine (possibly even great), as long as they don't panic.

(On a contrary note, have you noticed how abysmal the Sabres are in possession stats?  It's still early, but they're threatening to set all-time records for bad possession stats.  Under 35% Fenwick For, and barely 36% Corsi For.  Ouch.  I'm not sure what the all-time lows are, but I'm pretty sure they're a few percentage points higher than that.)

Anyway, back to the Caps, they've been a bit unlucky, so far.  The only game of the last three that I saw was the one against the Red Wings.  And that was a very good game; fun to watch, especially for such a low-event game.

The first period went, pretty heavily, to the Caps.  Corsi was probably pretty even, but Fenwick was heavily in the Caps favor, with the Wings managing only three shots on goal (I can't find the number, but I think the Caps were around twice that many blocked).  Goals went the Caps way as well, with Kuzya (off beautiful feeds from Holtby and Ward that got him alone behind the defense on the power play) and Brouwer scoring to erase and overcome a Nyquist goal in the ninth minute.

But things went south, badly, in the third, when a pair of goals (one off an impressively opportunistic use of a bad turnover by the Caps D) by Abdelkader, plus another, later, put the Red Wings in front to stay.

As near as I can tell, the following game, against Tampa, wasn't on TV at all, so I missed it completely.  There didn't seem to be a whole lot positive about it, although OV did break his five-game pointless streak (which didn't worry me, in and of itself, but I was worried about the lack of shots during the streak).

Then there was the game against the Coyotes, which I missed, entirely due to fatigue.  It was amusing, the next morning, when a friend told me they'd played one period, and lost 6-3.  I looked it up while he was telling me, and was amused to see the two late goals that brought it within a goal.  But he was fundamentally right; they didn't play a sixty-minute game.  In fact, if you took four minutes out of the game, it would have been a 6-1 blowout.

No, that's not terribly meaningful, but it is a much higher concentration of goals than you generally see.

But, through all of that, Caps have maintained good possession numbers, which is why I started by saying that I'm not worried about the team.  They'll turn it around; just take somewhat better care of the puck in their own end (some really brutal turnovers in there).

That left us at the start of last night's home rematch against Calgary.  I started this before that game, so I'll write it up separately.