March 3 vs. Ottawa Senators at Capital One Arena
Time: 6:30 p.m.
TV: MNMT
Radio: 106.7 THE FAN, Caps Radio 24/7
Ottawa Senators (30-25-4)
Washington Capitals (38-14-8)
With a unique weeknight starting time, the Caps conclude their season-long five-game homestand on Monday night against the Ottawa Senators. The game concludes the season’s series between the two teams, which split a pair of January overtime tilts in Ottawa, two weeks apart.
For the first time this season, the Caps will be going into Monday’s game seeking to shake off a modest three-game slide (0-3-0); they’ve scored a total of four goals while dropping the three middle games of the homestand. A trio of consecutive losses to Calgary, St. Louis and Tampa Bay, respectively, immediately followed a 16-game home point streak (11-0-5), the second-longest in franchise history.
“The next one is a huge game,” said Caps winger Tom Wilson after Saturday’s loss to the Lightning. “In this League, you’ve got to be consistent; you can’t drop too many in a row. The sign of a good team is bouncing back.
“I think the effort was there. I think the execution – for the most part – was there tonight, not our worst game. But it doesn’t matter, we’ve got to make sure we take the next one.”
There are a couple trends to the three losses; the starts haven’t been stellar in any of the three, and Washington has not held a lead at any point of the 180 minutes of hockey it has played, an anomaly for them this season.
“I think it helps any team,” says Caps defenseman Matt Roy, who has nine assists in his last 10 games. “If you can jump out to an early lead and just protect the lead, work from there, and have a jump start on the score, I think it’ll help any team. Going forward, I think our starts are going to be crucial for us, and we just need to find a way to get the puck in the net.”
Early in the first period of what was a scoreless game against the Lightning on Saturday, it appeared the Caps had broken the seal on the scoresheet when Jakob Chychrun’s point shot through traffic found twine behind Tampa Bay goaltender Andrej Vasilevskiy. But the Lightning wiped that lead away from Washington with a successful coach’s challenge; Chychrun played the puck with a high stick just prior to the goal.
The Caps ended up dealing with three penalty-killing missions in the first period, stunting the rhythm of their bench and the flow of their 5-on-5 play. They also fell behind 1-0 when the Lightning’s Mitchell Chaffee scored on the third of those Tampa Bay man advantages.
By the time Caps captain Alex Ovechkin scored his 884th career goal at 16:01 of the third to spoil Vasilevskiy’s bid for a second whitewash of Washington this season, it only halved the deficit to 2-1. A late empty-net goal sealed the Lightning’s eighth straight victory.
As Wilson says, the effort has been there. What appears to be lacking in the last three games is some swagger and connectivity, but that’s going to happen to virtually every team across the grind of a six-month, 82-game regular season.
“It’s not ideal, especially with the timing of where we’re at in the season and the teams that we’re playing against,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “I would say that it’s concerning; I wouldn’t say that I’m hitting the panic button by any stretch. We’ve lost three games against three teams that are gearing up. It’s not ideal; it doesn’t look good on our team, especially going into the trade deadline. So, we’re going to have to get it figured out.
“But adversity and going through this might not be a bad thing for our group to find out what we're made of, going into the last final stretch. And it's not going to get any easier because … the teams that we're playing are all, as I sometimes like to call it, DEF CON five. Meaning, they're going into these games, and they're probably talking as a group and the leadership group, and that, ‘These two points can be the difference between us playing into the end of April and not playing.’ It’s good, because now we’ll be able to use this gut check time for our group.”
Beginning with Ottawa on Monday night in the homestand finale, the Caps will face a trio of teams in DEF CON five mode. The Caps face the New York Rangers in Manhattan on Wednesday and return to the District to host the Detroit Red Wings on Friday.
The Senators come into town on the heels of a 5-3 win over San Jose, Saturday on home ice. That victory over the Sharks salvaged a pair of points from what had been a fruitless three-game homestand to that point, and it halted a five-game Ottawa slide (0-5-0).
Despite their recent travails, the Sens remain in the thick of the hunt for the postseason. Ottawa won five in a row immediately before dropping five straight, and it enters Monday’s game in ninth place in the Eastern Conference standings, two points behind Detroit for the final wild card berth. The Sens hold a game in hand on the Wings, and the two teams have two head-to-head meetings coming up later this month, one in each city.
Ottawa is one of eight teams clustered within seven points of one another and vying for the two Eastern Conference wild card berths.
