Caps Seek to Rebound vs. Sabres
Caps aim to halt short slide when Buffalo makes its lone visit to the District this season on Monday night
The Caps close out a two-game homestand on Monday night when they host the Buffalo Sabres at Capital One Arena. After Monday's game against the Sabres, the Caps will play six of their next seven games on the road.
Buffalo and Washington were both occupants of the temporarily cobbled East Division last season, when they faced one another eight times in the shortened 56-game slate. The Caps won six of those contests (6-1-1). The season, the Sabres return to the Atlantic Division and the Capitals are back in the Metropolitan Division. Monday's meeting is the first of three between the two teams, and the only one in the District this season.
Washington is seeking to halt a three-game losing streak (0-2-1), a slide that follows a streak of eight straight games with a point (5-0-3) to start the season. The Caps opened the homestand with a 2-1 loss to the Flyers on Saturday, a game in which they weren't able to generate much in the way of scoring chances, especially over the game's first 40 minutes.
"The third period was our best period," says Caps coach Peter Laviolette. "We got moving. We were sleeping in the first and we got outworked in the second, so the third period I thought was our best period. We started getting it behind them a little bit more and playing in the offensive zone and generating some chances."
Eleven games into the season, the Caps have had a lackluster period here and there. But Saturday's game is likely the first time they had two such stanzas consecutively, and arguably the first time they had two in the same game.
"I think we didn't spend a lot of time [in the offensive zone] because they were in our zone the whole time," says Caps center Nic Dowd of the first two frames against the Flyers. "But when we did get down there, we were slow to get up the ice, whether or not that was F-2 and F-3 helping out F-1, or if that was our [defensemen] getting up the ice.
"And I think that [the Flyers] did what we have done really well all season, is that [defensemen] -- or their forward, whoever it was - were moving pucks right away. And you could see it, at their best or our worst, it would go in and then the puck would immediately come out and then be in the neutral zone or back into our zone. It just puts a lot of pressure on us defensively. You spend enough time down there, and something bad is going to happen - a bad bounce or whatever you want to call it - and there's good players on other teams, so guys are going to create. But they did a definitely good job getting out of their end, and we just didn't quite put enough pressure on them and get all five guys up in the play."
Saturday night was the Caps' first look at the Flyers this season, and Philadelphia appears to have done good work over the offseason at fixing its problems in its own end of the ice. It's early, but the Flyers have trimmed their goals against by more than a goal against per game this season, going from dead last in the League to sixth in the circuit.
"I thought Philly played a great game," says Caps right wing Garnet Hathaway. "They've been playing well lately and they came into our rink prepared for a battle. We played two great teams on the road [in Florida] where I thought we played really well, and we didn't play as well [Saturday] night as we had in those previous two games."
For the first time since 1979-80, the Caps have had four rookies - Hendrix Lapierre, Martin Fehervary, Brett Leason and Connor McMichael - score their first NHL goal inside the first 10 games of a season. Washington is past the 10-game mark now, but it recalled another rookie from AHL Hershey on Sunday, and he could see his NHL debut against the Sabres on Monday.
The Caps recalled winger Axel Jonsson-Fjallby, whom they lost on waivers to the Sabres during training camp before reclaiming him from Buffalo just before the season started. The 23-year-old Jonsson-Fjallby was Washington's fifth-round choice (147th overall) in the 2016 NHL Draft. He had three goals and seven points in nine games with Hershey prior to his recall this season.
Buffalo finally finished off its long-rumored trade of former team captain Jack Eichel last month. Eichel, the second player chosen overall in the 2015 NHL Draft, spent the first six seasons of his NHL career with the Sabres, piling up 139 goals and 355 points in 375 games. But the Sabres never made the playoffs during Eichel's tenure in Buffalo, and the player and team couldn't come to an agreement over how Eichel's neck problem would be remedied; he preferred to have disk replacement surgery - a surgery no other NHL player has ever had - while the team had other ideas.
Last week, the Sabres finally shipped Eichel (along with a conditional third-rounder in 2023) to Vegas - which will acquiesce to his disk replacement desire - for a package of four assets: winger Alex Tuch, center Payton Krebs, a conditional first-round pick in 2022 and a conditional second-rounder in 2023.
Eichel appeared in only 21 of Buffalo's 56 games last season and he has yet to suit up at all in 2021-22. After suffering through a miserable 2020-21 season, the Sabres jumped out to a better start this season. Buffalo won three straight out of the gates, and it was 5-1-1 through seven games. But the Sabres returned from a four-game trip to California and Seattle - the same trip the Caps will embark upon next week - with a 1-3-0 mark, and they fell 4-3 in overtime to Detroit on home ice in their most recent outing on Saturday night.
The Sabres will lug a four-game losing streak (0-3-1) into Washington on Monday. It's a one-game journey for Buffalo, which will return home to host Edmonton on Friday and Toronto on Saturday after departing the District.
