Too little, too late (not to be confused with the Bolts' postgame buffet, where those two little tools ate - admit it, you love the puns!). How a team can come out as flat as the Caps did last night in a divisional game at home at the beginning of a killer stretch of games is beyond me. Olie Kolzig thinks it was a case of overconfidence ("Sometimes when you're a young team and things are going good, maybe you forget what got you into that position.") and Coach Hanlon agreed.
And while overconfidence may have played a part in the loss, so did the play of one defenseman in particular, who I won't call out by name (though it rhymes with Weave Cleminger), but who described his own play on what amounted to the back-breaking goal by Ruslan Fedotenko late in the second as "like [he] was in quicksand." In addition, said blueliner committed an atrociously stupid over-the-glass delay of game penalty with five seconds left in the first that turned into the Bolts' third goal.
Also notably mediocre-to-bad were Olie (though he did make a number of tough saves), the ice conditions, the annoying dude sitting directly behind me and Matt Pettinger. On the plus side, Olie will rebound and I cut Princess from my fantasy squad, so he should be good to go again. On the minus side, the ice will stink as long as they play 400 basketball games a winter at the V.C. and the jackass behind me may or may not have bought a season ticket package.
The comeback attempt was nice (as was AO's one-man-team goal), but the hole had been dug and it was simply to deep to climb out of. At the end of the day the Bolts just wanted the win more - and they got it.
- Hart: Patrice Bergeron (5A, +3, 4 SOG, 60% faceoffs won)
- Ross: Patrice Bergeron (5 points)
- Norris: Filip Kuba (G, 2A, 2 SOG)
- Vezina: Cristobal Huet (W, 42 saves on 44 shots against in 5-2 win at Buffalo)
- Richard: Andrew Brunette, Jason Blake, Marco Sturm (3G each)
- Calder: Anze Kopitar (2G, A, 4 SOG)
- Aiken, Pt. I: Andrew Raycroft (6 goals allowed on 26 shots against in two periods of work)
- Aiken, Pt. II: Dan Cloutier (because BoA says so)