The Two-Line Pass

The Lead

I can’t define what it is that unsettles me about this Capitals offense, but I know it when I see it.

Every year, EA’s NHL game has some kind of buggy little hole in its AI programming where as long as you can replicate the way you shoot the puck every time, you can pile up goals at a pace that would make Wayne Gretzky circa 1982 cry like a little baby girl. You remember. Carry it down the wing, cut across the slot at the faceoff circles, backhander. Goal City. Beat your friends 27-1 on five-minute periods. No problem.

Well I don’t know if the rest of the league has figured it out yet, but the Caps have found the way to do it in the actual NHL ‘10.

It’s not that the Capitals shouldn’t be a good team or anything. They should be just about as good as they are from a won-lost perspective. But the way they’re winning these games is just starting to become absurd.

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The Lead

Yes, yes, Alex Ovechkin returned to the Washington Capitals lineup tonight and, him being the no-talent bum that he is, it took him over 15 minutes of game time to score a goal! What a stiff. Ovechkin celebrated his return by letting Matt Bradley be the baddest-assed dude on the ice.

See, Bradley is that dude in the above photo, covered in blood because he got cut open above his left eye in a fight with Aaron Voros. And I think he missed like two shifts while he got stitched up and changed his jersey which was, by the time he got to the dressing room, also quite bloody.

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The Lead

So tonight the Flyers are beating the Caps by two late in the second period, right, And Philly’s a pretty good team with depth at pretty much every position and they’re not exactly wont to give up leads.

But the Caps had it figured out from the get-go: put your three best players, all three of which play different forward positions, on the same line and see what happens. What happens, of course, is that those three players combine for 4-5-9 and the Caps win 4-2. Nicklas Backstrom had the biggest night, scoring the tying goal and assisting on all three others. Alex Ovechkin ran his goal total to 11 in as many games with his brace tonight. Alex Semin went 1-2-3, and his goal was an absolute snipe.

So it stands to reason, then, that Bruce Boudreau would say this after the game, per Wyshynski’s Twitter: “Who knows where [they]‘ll be on Thursday.” YEAH BRUCE JEEZ WHO KNOWS?

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The Lead

Puck in the slot, Alex Ovechkin streaking toward it, you’re supposed to pick up the trailer.

Do you:

A) Dive at the puck.
B) Try to get in position to jockey with him to disrupt a shot.
C) Intentionally commit slash Ovechkin in the spine and hope they don’t score on the resultant power play.
D) Give Ovechkin 45 minutes to load it up, cock and fire a 620-mile-an-hour shot past Tim Thomas and doom your team to a loss.

Hint: NOT D!

I’m not exactly the world’s foremost expert on backchecking, but I feel like that’s pretty straightforward.

But this play was symptomatic of the Bruins’ entire 4-1 loss to the Capitals tonight. Lazy backcheck, disinterested forecheck, hopeless rushes. It all adds up to a bad loss.

Someone on Twitter noted that Boston fans can expect a similar offensive output most nights this season, and that’s certainly truish. He cited the loss of Kessel as the reason for the drop in production, but really it’s that the Bruins led the NHL in shooting percentage last year, putting 10.9 percent of their shots in the net, a full 1.45 better than league average. Only five other teams (Pittsburgh, Philly, Atlanta, St. Louis and Vancouver) broke 10 percent. The extra 1.45 accounted for an extra 36 goals above average — ironically exactly the number Kessel scored last year — and made the Bruins second in goals for instead of tied for 17th.

So all year, Bruins fans will be scratching their heads saying, “Why isn’t Lucic/Krejci/Ryder/Wheeler/Kobasew scoring like he did last year?” It’s because their shooting percentages were 17.5, 15.1, 14.6, 14.0 and 16.3, respectively and they’re all likely to regress, to varying degrees, toward the mean. Regardless of how well Marc Savard passes (very) or how good the defense is (also very), they simply can’t be expected to total last year’s ridiculous output.

And hey, tonight they went up against a team known for its defense and goalte…

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The Lead

Was hockey kidding? How can two consecutive games be THAT freaking awesome?

In 126:22 of hockey tonight, we were treated to 21 goals on 135 shots and more lead changes than any normal person could possibly consider rational.

Take the Penguins/Capitals game for example, the sixth in a now-seven-game series that has lived up to every inch of its lofty billing and will make the Conference Finals (be they against Boston or Carolina) look like the worst kind of anticlimax. It was 1-0 Pens after one. Then the Caps score twice. Then Geno Malkin levels inside of 30 seconds to go in the period and it’s 2-2 through two. Then all hell breaks loose.

Kris Letang scores on the power play at 4:40 of the third. Brooks Laich answers 58 seconds later and Viktor Kozlov puts his team up just 29 seconds after that (with a special tip of the hat to Hal Gill, who’s pictured above). But then Sid Crosby, clearly the best player on the ice in this series, scores with just under five minutes to go in the period to force overtime. That’s where The Steckel came in to pop in his second goal in this series, both of which have been game-winners.

Then go have a peak at that Chicago/Vancouver game. No Game 7 necessary there, eh? Nah, Patty Kane took care of that. Hat trick for the kid. Lead changed five times in that one. Home team won before their huge home crowd which, for the year, officially topped one million fans tonight, a good fifth of which might’ve turned up to see them play last year.

And that game was a lot like the Pittsburgh game in that many of its goals came in bunches. The two goals in the first were scored exactly two minutes apart. Three of the four in the second were scored in the space of 4:32. The first two in the third came 1:58 apart, and the last four were in 4:02. It was nuts. And despite having three separate leads, Vancouver only actually found itself ahead of the Blackhawks for 4:43.

There was just no unseating the Blackhawks or Caps tonight. Awesome night of hockey.

The Lead

Yeah yeah, Sid and Ovie. Both score hat tricks. We get it. Big deal. I’ve been watching Versus since the playoffs started. They’re supposed to do that. Every game.

But David Steckel. Guy came outta nowhere. Scored a beauty. Yessir.

And that was really the difference. Ovie showed up. Sid showed up. Simeon Varlamov showed up (for the sake of argument). And no one else did. Except Steckel.

This game was literally 60 minutes of a bunch of people skating around with no rhyme or reason to it, just hoping Sid and Ovie would hop over the boards and take the game by the scruff of the neck because they sure as hell had no interest in doing so. That, sadly, includes Evgeni Malkin who once again recorded an assist against the Capitals, but also did a whole lot of “falling down” and “turning the puck over” in the lead-up.

So the difference in a Sid/Ovie slugfest came down to one man — David Steckel, the pride of Westbend, Wisconsin — who now has as many goals in the two games of this series as he did in his prior 32. Which is kinda crazy if you sit down and think about it.

But what the hell, right? Someone’s gotta show up. Might as well be the guy with 13 career goals. Since it sure isn’t anyone else.

By the way, at some point, this Gary Bettman wet dream has to end, right? Of the 12 goals scored in the series, Crosby and Ovechkin have combined for eight of them. The one has never failed to equal the other’s production.And in his midtown Manhattan office, Bettman is almost assuredly printing out hundreds of copies of the Nielsen ratings and rolling around nude in them, crying tears of joy and breathing silent thank yous to his chosen deity. He really couldn’t have gotten a better pair of opening games outta these two horses.

Oh yeah, and David Steckel.

He rules.

The Lead

Are you kidding me, Mike Green?

On what planet must a defenseman have been assimilated to have the ability to score that many goals in a season?

Tonight Green scored the game-tying and game-winning goals in Washington’s nervy 5-3 win over the Islanders, both after assisting on Alex Ovechkin’s 54th of the year. The assist was No. 40 of the season for Green, who now has more assists than any defenseman who’s not on the Detroit power play, and the goals were Nos. 29 and 30. Repeat: 29 and 30. In his 63rd game.

It’s the first time a defenseman has done THAT in 17 years (Kevin Hatcher — who? — was the last). His goals per game is 14th in the NHL!

This year and for much of last year as well, one supposes, Green has been an unstoppable offensive dynamo on the Washington offense, not that you didn’t know that. He scores, he passes, he eats big minutes, and his team, despite a really fairly shallow defensive pool from which to draw and not-great goaltending, doesn’t give up the amount of goals it probably should.

The knock on Green, obviously, has always been the fact that he seems to be only an offensive defenseman which, given the numbers (70 points!), is not unreasonable assumption, but in his latest look at the best defensive defensemen in hockey this year, James Mirtle pointed out that Green is also having the 10th-best season among NHL defensemen in his own end (this number is based on goals against per 60 minutes at even strength and shorthanded, plus quality of competition). Not that 10th is an outstanding number, but it is certainly better than I imagine most would suspect.

He’ll also isn’t afraid to get a little physical (see his hit tonight on Timmy Jackman) and he blocks a good amount of shots (101 in 63 games).

So there goes the argument that he’s soft and one-dimensional.

Why is there even a discussion about who should get the Norris? We should be seeing Reagan/Mondale numbers come awards season. (Not that Mike Green cares for awards. He is not programmed with humon emotion.)

In terms of everything he brings to a team, and the fact that he’s.. my god, he’s only 23 … he might be the best all-around defenseman in the NHL today.

You can’t name a better one, anyway. And if you come in here with that Lidstrom or Chara nonsense, I will see you right back out again.

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Because I tend to not blog on the weekends, here is a feature that will run through the entire season. It aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact about each team that played. And hell, there’s a ton of other crap for me to blather on about too. And yes, I’m totally ripping off just about every other blogger ever’s weekly column, but that’s something you’ll have to deal with on your own time.

Danger: This post contains language that some people might not like. This will be the only thing on the site that regularly does so.

Okay sure, Mike Green had his streak of consecutive games with a goal scored snapped today against the Panthers, but he scored 10 goals in his previous eight games, and one imagines it’s going to be a long time before you see anyone do that again.

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From the DC Sports Bog, which you should really be reading every second of the day anyway:

Nicklas Backstrom painted this for charity. Apparently it’s John Holmqvist. I only see Jason Voorhees and his love of the number one.

I wonder if he farmed the work out to Chris Bourque (get it because he basically flunked out of BU?).

Here is a live blog of the Bruins-Capitals preseason game in Boston at 4 p.m.

Want lines? Here are Washington’s, Boston’s are here.

All updates are below the jump.

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