Rangers - 4 Capitals - 3
I said it before the series and I'll say it again - the Caps are going to need to average more than 3 goals a game this series because the Rangers will do the same. The Caps got to the three mark but could not find that fourth goal, despite being the better team for a majority of the game. There were two players who contributed to the out come of this game, Henrik Lundqvist and Jose Theodore.
Lundqvist, despite giving up three goals was excellent tonight. He faced a ton of heat in the first period and held the caps scoreless and was beaten on shots that he had little to no chance on. Jose Theodore on the other hand gave up an extremely soft, Carey Price esque type goal to Gomez which allowed us to get back into the game once they scored and was out of position on both the Antropov and Naslund goals. The Brandon Dubinsky goal wasn't on him at all, but still, he needed to make a big stop for his team on atleast one of those goals and he wasn't able to, I have a feeling that will be the story of this series.
That said, we played an awful game tonight. Whats with this passive shit? Did Tom Renney put on a John Tortorella costume and get behind the bench tonight? We made it way to fucking easy for the Caps to gain the blue line and get their cycle going. The offense flashed some signs of life at times, but not often enough. One thing that became evident to me is that we need to generate most of our offense in this series via the transition (guess how we scored 3 of our 4 goals tonight?) The Gomez goal? came off a turn over where we took it the other way, got an odd man rush and scored. The Nasulnd goal? Gomez caugh the caps in a bad change, created a partial odd man rush and we scored. The Dubinsky goal? Caught the Caps D on the ice after a long PP shift and scored. The Caps continously get all five of their players in on the offense. When you stand them up at the top of your own zone and most of those guys are either at the same level or behind you guess what? You'll have the oppurtunity to create a bunch of odd man rushes the other way. If we pull that off in Game two, we'll go back to the Garden up 2-0 in this series.
My keys to the series were...
Henrik Lundqvist - Check
Capitalize on mistakes and score on them - Check
Stay the fuck out of the penalty box....
Ok, so we didn't get much help from the Refs on a few of those calls but they weren't all bad calls. We are not going to win many games where we give the Caps seven chances on the power play. The worst thing the Refs did today was miss the elbow/charge on Sjostrom by Mike Green, that was an extremely dirty play that should be reviewed by the league and really reinforced my desire to draft Zack Kassian in this years draft. All in all we played a sub par game against the third best home team in the NHL at their barn with shoddy officating and without or captian... and won.
3 up 3 down
1. Brandon Dubinsky - What a move on that game winner. Scored 3 goals in the last two games and looks like hes found his game. He was a very good playoff last year, hope he continues to build on that.
2. Wade Redden/Michael Rozsival - This tandem scared me the most going up against the caps and they were our strongest pair tonight, well done.
3. Henrik Lundqvist - We'll go as far as he takes us. If this is what we have to look forward to, we'll go pretty far.
3 down
1. Nik Zherdev - where the fuck were you tonight?
2. Marcus Naslund - Three awful penalties and just a really dumb behind the back pass on a 2-1. He had 2 points today but that doesn't reflect how this game was for him, he was terrible.
3. Mike Green - The Marcus Naslund of the Washington Capitals (atleast for this game.) He had 2 points but was also a minus 2. I dont think I've ever seen him look worse.
Next Game: Saturday @ 1 PM EST. We win this game and the series is pretty much ours.
