Caps Conclude Showcase with 8-5 Win Over Preds

After six days in the Florida heat and humidity, the Caps are heading home from the 2018 Prospect Showcase in Estero, Fla. The Caps kids showed well at the three-team showcase, posting a 2-1 record in the wake of an 8-5 win over Nashville on Tuesday, a barnburner of a tournament finale.

Washington iced the youngest and the most homegrown group of the three teams 2018 tourney. Six of the 23 players the Caps brought to Florida are 2018 draft choices; Tampa Bay and Nashville combined to bring a grand total of just three 2018 draftees to Estero. Seventeen of the 23 Washington players are Capitals draft choices while Tampa Bay's roster featured 16 and Nashville's roster had 13 drafted players.
The youthful Caps acquitted themselves better at the 2018 tourney than they did in either of their previous trips to Florida for the Showcase. They ramped up their offensive output from four goals in their first game to five in the second to their eight-goal outburst in the finale, and 19 of the 21 skaters they brought to Florida recorded at least a point.
Caps defensemen Connor Hobbs and Jonas Siegenthaler each played in the Showcase for the third time this year, and Hobbs sported the captain's "C" in the two games he skated in while Siegenthaler's sweater was adorned with the alternate captain's "A" in each of his two contests.
"Well, it felt really different," said Hobbs of the 2018 tournament, "because [Tuesday] was my first win - I think - in it. It was different in that way, and also in being one of the older guys, it being my third one. It was different in a good way, and I thought we did really well today."

They sure did. The Caps scored two in the first, two in the second, and four in the third, never trailing in a convincing win over the Preds. Nashville edged the Caps 5-4 in the first game of the tournament on Saturday, but it was all Washington in Tuesday's rematch. The game got a little hairy late when a flurry of goals - five of them in a 120-second span - in the final four minutes of the third period threatened to burn out the red lamps. Nashville netted three of those five goals, but still trailed by at least two goals for the last 35-plus minutes of the contest.
Washington's first line of Axel Jonsson-Fjallby, Garrett Pilon and Riley Sutter was involved in the manufacturing of each of the Caps' first three goals on Tuesday, and it added a fourth one later. Sutter scored twice, and Pilon and Hobbs also scored. Other Washington goals came from Max Kammerer, Beck Malenstyn, Eric Florchuk and Kody Clark. Each of Washington's six 2018 draftees collected at least a point in the tourney.
Sutter and Pilon played together with the WHL Everett Silvertips for the second half of the 2017-18 season, and they were certainly a handful for the Preds defense to deal with on Tuesday.
"Just being able to be here with guys who have played pro and see how fast the pace is and how big and strong the guys are," says Sutter, "it's just kind of nice to see where I'm at with all of the other guys. It was lots of fun to be able to play with some familiar faces like Garrett and also play with some new guys, too. I think we did really well this weekend, and I'm looking forward to next week."
Sutter led all players in the tourney with three goals while Pilon and Caps defenseman Alexander Alexeyev tied for the tourney lead with four assists each. With five points each, Sutter and Pilon tied for the tournament scoring lead. Ten of the 13 Caps forwards at the tourney scored at least one goal, and Washington defensemen combined to record a goal and a dozen points.
After Ilya Samsonov started each of the first two games for the Caps, invitee Logan Thompson went the distance in goal to earn the win on Tuesday, stopping 30 of the 35 shots he faced.

"I think we defended the rush real well," says Hershey coach Spencer Carbery. "Our squeezes were good, and we were able to turn that into transition. So it's one thing to defend well, and to defend your line and create those turnovers, and then it's a whole another thing to now take that and turn that into offense.
"And that's what we tried to talk about, that transition speed. And then the plays, and that's where the players that we have, their ability and skill gets to show through in all of the different things that we created off the rush - the delays and hitting our [defense] and our [defense] getting involved. All of that stuff, they get to display their creativity and their individual skill."
Those players can now take a richly deserved day off on Wednesday. The real work starts on Friday when they take to the ice at MedStar Capitals Iceplex for the start of 2018 Capitals training camp.