"Whenever you play a team for a second time," says Caps coach Todd Reirden, "that's when you can start to do some different things as a coach, make some adjustments, and try to find some areas where you can break the other team down. That's where I feel like our staff does an excellent job of preparing our team for different situations, in particular the second time we play a team.
"That will make life a little easier in terms of breaking down pre-scout games on our staff."
Step Right Up - Over the last 13 games, the Caps have gone 11-2-0 without Brooks Orpik, 9-2-0 in 11 games without T.J. Oshie, 6-0-0 without Evgeny Kuznetsov and 3-0-0 without Tom Wilson. Clearly they've had some players step up and make significant contributions while Orpik and that trio of top six forwards was out of the lineup for various periods, some of which overlapped.
Oshie just got back into the lineup in Tuesday's win over the Wings, and he noted a difference between the way the Caps were handling themselves in game 30 of the season as opposed to the way they were playing more than a dozen games earlier.
"I think the biggest difference that I noticed," says Oshie, "was that it felt like that all-in mentality where no matter how the game was going, someone was going to step up and get the team going, and everyone else was going to follow. Whether that's Nick [Backstrom] or [Alex Ovechkin], or [Nic Dowd's] line has been really, really good this month, and even before that.
"It was good to see and it made it easier sitting out when you could see the guys playing like that, like we had in the past."
Wilson missed the first 16 games of the season because of a league suspension, and after skating in the next 11 games, he was injured and missed three more.
"I think on that one road trip we kind of turned it around," says Wilson, referring to a four-game journey in which the team went 3-1-0 from Nov. 13-19. "It was just a buy-in. The whole group mentality was, 'All right, it's time to buy in, it's time to play the right way.' We've played maybe some of the best hockey in the league the last couple of years, and we were aware that early on in the year it wasn't good enough.
"So we made the fix, and it was a buy-in and we kind of turned it around. The group that is out there every night has done a great job of getting it done. That's all you can ask for, guys stepping up, guys rising to the occasion and taking on maybe different roles than what they were used to a couple of days before or a week before."
Powering Up - During Oshie's recent 11-game absence from the Washington lineup, the Caps went 6-for-32 (18.8 percent) on the power play. That's a middling figure that would rank around 18th in the league if compiled over the full season to date.
But when you consider that among those six power-play goals were a four-on-three overtime goal, a five-on-three power-play goal, and an extra-man tally from the Caps' second power play unit, that leaves only three five-on-four power-play goals from the team's top unit over a 14-game span from Nov. 11 through Dec. 8. Two of those came from Wilson, and one from Nicklas Backstrom.
The Caps have had only four power play opportunities in their last two games, but they've converted on three of the four. When Alex Ovechkin scored on the power play in the third period of Friday's game against Carolina, it marked his first five-on-four power-play goal in more than a month, since Nov. 7 against Pittsburgh. Ovechkin did net a five-on-three power-play goal against the Canadiens in Montreal on Nov. 19.
Welcome To The Show - With defenseman Christian Djoos out of the lineup indefinitely, the Caps recalled blueliner Tyler Lewington from AHL Hershey on Saturday morning. It's the first NHL call-up for the 24-year-old, who was Washington's seventh-round pick (204th overall) in the 2013 NHL Draft. Lewington has 11 goals, 40 points and 447 penalty minutes in 211 career AHL contests.
