Caps Face Flyers in Sunday Matinee
Washington seeks to snap a short two-game slide on home ice as it hosts Philadelphia for the first time this season on Sunday afternoon
© Patrick McDermott
Washington finishes off a two-game homestand on Sunday afternoon when the Philadelphia Flyers hit town for the first time this season. The Sunday matinee is just the second meeting this season between the two Metropolitan Division rivals, and it's also the first of two consecutive home games for the Capitals against Philadelphia. The Flyers return to Washington on Jan. 31 for the first game following the NHL's All-Star break for both teams.
The Caps come into Sunday's game lugging a two-game losing streak (0-1-1) and they've also lost two in a row at home for the first time since they dropped three straight at Capital One Arena back in October.
"I think half of our roster is not where they should be right now," said Caps coach Barry Trotz in the aftermath of Friday's loss to the Montreal Canadiens. "We've got to get out of the break. We've got a big game on Sunday and we're going to have to be much better in a lot of areas of our game - in terms of execution, in terms of turnovers. Let's get back to work."
Sunday's game against Philadelphia will be the third for the Caps in a span of less than 72 hours; they came out of their five-day bye week with a 4-3 overtime loss to the Devils in New Jersey on Thursday and dropped a 3-2 home ice decision to the Canadiens on Friday night.
"I think [Thursday] night we got some of the rust off a little bit, and in the third period we worked with purpose and we were able to get a point. [Friday], I just didn't think we had enough guys putting in a real full day's work. Like I said, too much cheat and not enough compete in a lot of areas."
Last season, the Caps also played a set of back-to-backs coming out of the bye week, and they went 0-1-1. They've done the same this time around. But last season's bye week came in the middle of February, and the schedule returned to what passes for normal the rest of the way. After that 0-1-1 hiccup out of the bye week, the Caps went 16-7-2 the rest of the way.
This season, the schedule doesn't normalize until next month. Washington has not done well with breaks of three or more days, posting a 7-10-6 record in their first game after such breaks since the start of the 2014-15 season. The Caps will have two more such breaks between now and the end of January. After Sunday's game with the Flyers finishes off a stretch of three games in less than 72 hours, the Caps will play just one game in the next nine days. They're going to have to try to snap themselves out of a 1-2-1 slump with just three games between now and the end of the month, with two of them coming at home against the Flyers.
"Obviously with the [bye week] being a month earlier this year, it makes January kind of strange," says Caps goaltender Braden Holtby. "It's been a big test in January every night mentally, to make sure that we're giving our best effort every night. The games and the routines haven't been very normalized for the last little while, and they won't be for the next little bit here.
"Our job is just to fight through that as best as we can and put ourselves in a good enough position that when the schedule does start to even out in the latter couple of months, when we play a lot, but we play mostly every second day. Hopefully we can use that to our advantage then, and we can go rolling into the playoffs on a smooth note."
Trotz is doing his part to spark the troops with a thorough re-jiggering of his line combinations at Saturday's practice. He split up captain Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom for the first time in roughly two months, putting Ovechkin with Evgeny Kuznetsov and Tom Wilson and placing Backstrom between Andre Burakovsky and T. J. Oshie.
Recently, the Caps have been subsisting off the offensive largesse of Brett Connolly and Lars Eller, who have combined to supply nine of the 22 goals Washington has scored in its seven games this month. A few of the Caps' most dangerous and effective offensive weapons have been too quiet of late.
Ovechkin has one goal in his last five games and Burakovsky is without a goal in seven straight games. Oshie has one goal in his last 20 games and none in his last 11. Kuznetsov has one goal in his last 11 games and Jakub Vrana - who is likely to sit out as a healthy scratch on Sunday - has not scored in 14 games, and he has just three assists over that span.
"If you've watched us play lately, we've gone a little bit stale in some areas of our game," Trotz declares. "I don't know if it's the break, but I go right before the break. I've been contemplating that maybe it's time for a little bit of a sitch. It might be a game or it might be [for] the next 20, I don't know.
"[Over] 82 games, teams have lulls in the way they play, and how they play, and how they execute. Production-wise, we've got guys who the last 10 or 12 games have gotten zero, have fundamentally gotten nothing. So as a coach you try to - as I have in the last couple of games - move lines around."
Sunday's meeting is the first between the two Metropolitan Division rivals since the Flyers put an 8-2 beating on the Caps in Philadelphia's home opener back on Oct. 14. Washington was finishing up its first set of back-to-backs of the season that night while the Flyers were coming off a three-day break. It remains the Capitals' worst loss of the season.
Philadelphia has pulled itself up the standings ladder a bit here in the last several weeks of the season after a 10-game slide (0-5-5) that ran from Nov. 11-Dec. 2. Rumblings of a possible coaching change dissipated when the Flyers broke that bad spell by running the table on a three-game road trip through Western Canada; no easy feat, that.
Beginning with that successful journey in early December, the Flyers have won 14 of their last 20 (14-5-1) to reinsert themselves into the thick of the playoff chase. Philly won nine of 11 home games over that stretch, but the Flyers have won two of six road games (2-3-1) since coming back from Western Canada.
The Flyers' top forward trio of Claude Giroux, Sean Couturier and Travis Konecny has helped fuel the team's recent run of success. At least one of those three players has scored in eight of the Flyers' last 10 games. Couturier has done most of the heavy offensive lifting with 10 goals in those last 10 games, a tear that includes three straight multi-goal games. All three are former first-round Philly draft choices - Giroux in 2005, Couturier in 2011 and Konecny in 2015.
