The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

The Washington Capitals called Olaf Kolzig their goalie for 16 years and they treated him well. When they call him their opponent, ehhh not so much.

Kolzig, who was greeted with chants of “Olie, Olie,” a long standing ovation and a video tribute, gave up goals on Washington’s first two shots by Tom Poti and Mike Green, respectively, and Eric Fehr added another before the first period was over. The Caps cruised from there to a 4-2 win over the still-hapless Tampa Bay Lightning.

The Capitals did all that despite really not playing very well. That first shot of the game, while it found the back of the net, also took 8:20 to materialize, which, against Tampa’s defense, is embarrassing.

More embarrassing though was the way Tampa played in front of Kolzig, who was hardly to blame for coughing up the four-spot. Newly-acquired Steve Eminger was just outstanding in being on the ice for all three first-period goals and did nothing to stop almost any Washington play from developing. All three, in fact, came on similar transitions where two forwards broke into the zone, collapsed coverage to the puckside and dumped it to the other wing for a trailer. Every time. It worked several additional times per period and the Lightning either never picked up on what’s a fairly simple break-in play or are simply too bad to do anything about it. In any event it created far more chances than Kolzig or Barry Melrose can have liked.

The Bolts at least started trying by the time the middle of the second period rolled around and the game was already a foregone conclusion. Gary Roberts scored a pair of power play goals, one late in the second and the other with 26 seconds to go in the game.

Oh and that last Washington goal? Kid you may have heard of, one Alex Ovechkin, scored it on a nice redirection of a pass from Alex Semin for his third of the year. It was Ovie’s first goal in almost exactly a month and was greeted with another standing ovation from the crowd at the Verizon for his troubles. He hadn’t gotten on the scoresheet since Oct. 11 when he netted a pair against Chicago. Ovie also had an assist on Greenie’s goal. The Semin helper boosted his point total to 22, tying him for the league lead with Evgeni Malkin, which I guess you’d call pretty good.

And across the ice from Kolzig was the real goaltending show. Longtime Kolzig backup and good buddy Brent Johnson made 34 saves to help Washington to the win, something Jose Theodore would not have come close to doing.

But for me, the real story is that the problems in Tampa deepen evermore. There’s no way a team with any pride allows its teammate to get punked out by his former club in his first game against them. Not that badly at least. The quote-unquote defensemen in front of him, most notably Eminger and Lukas Krajicek in the first period, should be ashamed of themselves for leaving Kolzig out to dry like that.

Elsewhere…

Edmonton 3, New York Rangers 2 (SO)

The only other game on the schedule tonight saw Jeff Drouin-Deslauriers stake his claim for the breakup of the Edmonton goaltending power trio, making 40 saves (that’s 77 in two back-to-back games) to pick up his second straight win and knock off the best team in the East. Droin-Deslauriers also shut out the trio of Nik Zherdev, Freddy Sjostrom and Markus Naslund in the shootout. Erik Cole and Kyle Brodziak gave the Oilers a two-goal lead with a pair of tip-ins before the Rangers leveled on goals from Paul Mara and Chris Drury. Henrik Lundqvist made 29 saves in real hockey and only gave up one goal, that to Ales Hemsky, in the gimmick portion of the evening. Oh yeah, and before I forget, you keep it goin’, Huggy Bear!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11th, 2008 at 3:00 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.