Caps Face Flyers in Saturday Matinee
Caps finish two-game Metro tour in Philly
The Caps conclude a two-game Metropolitan Division trip - and a stretch of four straight road games - on Saturday afternoon in Philadelphia against the Flyers. Washington absorbed a 4-1 loss at the hands of the Rangers in New York on Thursday night in the trip opener.
Thursday's loss came after the Caps had been away from the rink for a week between games. In that period of time, they were able to get defenseman Justin Schultz back in the lineup following a one-game absence because of a lower body injury and they also welcomed T.J. Oshie back to the lineup after he had missed more than a month of action with an upper body injury.
Oshie skated 20:06 in his return, third most among Washington forwards in the game. Schultz skated 17:19, but he did not partake in a Friday afternoon practice in Philadelphia, an absence that Caps coach Peter Laviolette refers to as, "maintenance at this point, and if we need to update that [on Saturday], we will."
"Defensively, I don't think we gave up too much; I thought we were pretty tight," says Laviolette of Thursday's loss in New York. "There's definitely a couple turnovers that led to goals, and there's always things you're trying to do better defensively, but a pretty tight game for us.
"Offensively, there were a lot of chances there, a lot of quality chances. If you double up in that area, you expect to win a game and it didn't happen for us. We weren't able to get it into the net and score at the rate that we would have liked to, based on some of the looks and the chances that we had."
Washington put 37 shots on New York's Igor Shesterkin, the most the Caps have managed in a game since they put 39 shots on net - while yielding 42 shots against - in a 5-2 win over the Jets in Winnipeg on Dec. 17. Shesterkin stopped the first 35 shots he saw and rarely - if ever - allowed a second whack after one of his saves. Only Alex Ovechkin was able to solve him, a shutout-killer with 62 seconds left.
"It's hard really for me to critique the entire team because I haven't been in the room for a while, a place I love to be," says Oshie. "It felt like to me that we weren't sharp. We were a little sluggish. We had small pieces of the game where it looked like we were starting to build some momentum, and then it felt like we would take a penalty or something would break down and they would get an odd man rush and the momentum would shift again.
"These guys have been through a lot this year; a lot of guys carrying guys like myself who haven't been in the lineup a lot. A nice little break, but not really satisfied with our full game effort and how sharp we were. But we've got a game in a day and a half, and it's awesome we get to go back out there and improve."
Saturday's matinee match against the Flyers is the game to which Oshie refers. The Caps staged a stirring late comeback here in Philadelphia just over a week ago, overcoming a sudden and late deficit in the game to rally for a stunning 5-3 win. Down 3-2 after Gerry Mayhew's goal with 3:51 left, the Caps rallied for a pair of Garnet Hathaway goals and a John Carlson empty-netter from long distance to claim their fifth straight road win in their final game before the break.
For the second straight season, the Flyers have been unable to sustain a swift start. Roughly a third of the way through last season's 56-game slate, the Flyers owned a record of 11-4-3. But Philadelphia won consecutive contests only once the rest of the way, tumbling to sixth place in the temporarily cobbled East Division.
This season, the Flyers stood at 8-4-2 on Nov. 16, but a subsequent 10-game slide (0-8-2) pushed them down to the Metro cellar and cost Alain Vigneault his job as Philly's coach. The Flyers are now 7-16-6 since Mike Yeo took over behind the bench.
Philly's lineup should be significantly more formidable than it was for last week's game when the Flyers were missing a raft of regulars. A handful of returnees since will give their forward group a new look on three of the four lines. Even with the turnover in the Flyers' lineup in the last 10 days, the Caps can find value in the tape from last week's win here.
"The personnel, when you lose pieces or gain pieces, that can either strengthen or weaken your team," says Laviolette, "but typically the system and the identity doesn't change much out there. We'll go back and we actually use that a lot, we'll use the systems and what it is that we need to do, where we could have bene better and things we did pretty well, and we'll try to get better as a group.
"Typically, things don't change much just based on personnel. The personnel changes, and that can make a team better or worse. But the systems are pretty set in stone."
