The Caps carry a modest three-game winning streak into Wednesday's contest, and they are 6-1-1 in their last eight. Although they've tightened things up considerably in their own end of the ice over the course of that stretch, Caps coach Peter Laviolette is now seeing an uptick in offensive production from his charges.
"Even in the Pittsburgh games [last month], if you look at it, I thought that we were really good defensively," says Laviolette. "And so that part of the game has been there and has been coming. It's the offensive part that I've seen strides and seen improvement in. That second Pittsburgh game [on Feb. 25] was really good, and then we lost [Evgeny Kuznetsov to an upper body injury], and that hiccupped us again; now [T.J. Oshie] is back in the middle of the ice.
"But I think the offensive part is what is coming. We want to go back to that Pittsburgh game with our full lineup and build off of that."
Over this past weekend in New Jersey, the Caps swept the Devils in a set of back-to-back matinee matches, winning 5-2 on Saturday and 3-2 on Sunday. In each of those games, they severely limited the young and speedy Devils attack, holding them at bay for long stretches of each contest.
"I think we are defending harder, and we're defending as a group," says Caps right wing Tom Wilson. "That's something that Lavi has demanded and challenged us on in the last little bit. I think the offense will always come from this group; there are a lot of creative players here.
"But just playing mean and playing hard, like [Brenden Dillon] stepping up [to fight New Jersey's Nathan Bastian] on Sunday is also important. That's an old school fight and that definitely gives us a spark. Playing good defense means a lot of different things, and being tough to play against is one of them."
Washington has scored a fair number of transition goals recently, and it has also been prolific with give-and-go goals as of late.
