The Capitals took on the new look Quinn Hughes Wild Tuesday night. In my opinion the Wild are the most underrated team in the league maybe this is the season they finally can make a Cup run.
The Wild got on the board early in the 1st via a Vladimir Tarasenko top of the zone shot off a great pass from behind the Cap’s net to beat a very much screened Charlie Lindgren (I counted 3 guys). 1-0 Bad guys.
Then in the 2nd the Wild on the power-play Kirill Kaprizov was able to grab a juicy rebound of his own teammates butt it looked like and smacked it home for the 2-0 Wild lead.
Then early in the 3rd Tarasenko got on the board again with an Ovechkin like goal off the offensive zone faceoff to give the Wild a 3-0 lead.
Then when it looked like the Capitals had a solid 4v2 scoring chance, a McMichael wide shot gave the Wild a nice 1v1 transition chance where Tarasenko showed some silky mitts to the draw the Cap’s defenders to him leaving a crashing Danila Yurov open to beat Lindgren, 4-0 not us.
Then to make matters worse as people would say the icing on the cake the Capitals turn the puck over on their power-play allowing Matt Bouldy to make it 5-0 on the short-handed goal.
As bad as this game felt this was only the 2nd time the Caps have been shut-out this season and lets be honest we deserved to be shut-up last night. (Other shutout was against Dallas)
The makes it sound like the Wild dominated all facets of the game but the time of possession was relatively even.
As for our special teams unit specifically our power-play which is so bang or bust. The Caps have only 1 power-play goal in their last 15 chances.
Also we can’t go a game where Ovechkin has ZERO shots on goal in 15:12 minutes of ice time.
Obviously scoring is a huge issue for this team and based on puckpedia we have $12 million available to spend at the deadline to hopefully find a goal scorer.
This is now 3 losses in the row for the boys. They have a chance to right the ship Thursday agaisnt the Maple Leafs who in my opinion have a somewhat similar roster put together.
The Morning Skate 