Caps Visit Vegas
Caps conclude three-game road trip with first ever visit to Vegas, taking on the surprising and surging Golden Knights on Saturday
By
Mike Vogel
WashingtonCaps.com
On Saturday evening, the Capitals will make their first ever visit to Las Vegas to take on the newest member of the NHL's Original 31, the Vegas Golden Knights. For the Caps, Saturday's game also concludes their seventh set of back-to-back games this season and a three-game road trip that leads into the NHL's three-day holiday break.
Washington arrives in Vegas on the heels of a 3-2 overtime loss to the Arizona Coyotes in Glendale on Friday night. Seeking to extend their winning streak to a season-high total of five, the Caps came within 61 seconds of doing so. But Christian Fischer tied the game for Arizona with Coyotes goaltender Scott Wedgewood pulled for the extra attacker, and Clayton Keller won it for the Coyotes in the final minute of overtime.
"When you get up, you've got to find a way to put games away," says Caps right wing T.J. Oshie. "There are too many good teams to get up and sit back and think a one-goal game's going to cut it. Sometimes it does, but we've got to find a way to either score and give us a little cushion, or we've got to find a way in those last two minutes to get every puck out, and every puck in."
Instead of the Caps earning a fifth straight win and taking their first regulation victory in Arizona in nearly a dozen years, Washington becomes the victim of Arizona's eighth win of the season and its first in eight games. The Coyotes have needed to play more than 60 minutes for five of their eight victories this season.
Friday's loss leaves the Caps with a still impressive 8-1-1 record for the month of December, but they may have also squandered their best opportunity to ensure a winning road trip in failing to close out the Coyotes. If the Capitals hope to head home with two wins over the course of this three-game road trip, they'll have to win on Saturday against the Golden Knights in Vegas.
That's proven to be a tall task for most teams that have come into town during the first few months of the Golden Knights' NHL existence, and the Caps will be attempting to do so on extremely short rest while Vegas has been sitting at home and idling since Tuesday, when it last played.
The Vegas team has gone from concept to juggernaut in a span of just over six months. Longtime Caps GM George McPhee was hired to be the architect of the nascent Golden Knights, and he has assembled a team that reached the 20-win plateau faster than any other expansion team in the league's history.
Not quite to the halfway point of its first season, Vegas has endured a pair of three-game skids, but the Knights have experienced nothing resembling the first-year travails of any of their previous expansion brethren. For the 1974-75 Capitals, a three-game losing streak was virtually synonymous with "pick any week of the season." The Caps finished 8-67-5 in Year One.
As the Caps hit town on Saturday, Vegas is just two points off the Pacific Division-leading pace of 48 points established by the Los Angeles Kings. The Golden Knights hold three games in hand on the Kings, and Vegas boasts the second best points percentage (.697) in the league this season. The Golden Knights trail only the Tampa Bay Lightning (.765) in that department.
Vegas has been particularly strong on home ice, forging a lusty 14-2-1 mark in its first 17 games at T-Mobile Arena. The Golden Knights won their season opener on the road in Dallas, the first of three straight wins to start the team's existence. Vegas won eight of its first nine games, and may end up getting through its first season in the league without seeing the wrong side of the .500 mark. That would be quite an achievement.
Since dropping three straight from Nov. 28-Dec. 1, the Golden Knights have won seven of their last eight games (7-0-1), including each of their last three. Most recently, Vegas scored four power-play goals in a 4-3 home ice win over the Lightning on Tuesday. That game was the fourth game in Vegas' five-game homestand that concludes with Washington's Saturday night visit. The Golden Knights are 3-0-1 on the homestand to date, and they haven't suffered a regulation setback on home ice since Nov. 28 when Dallas blanked them, 3-0.
McPhee left some quality players on the table during last June's expansion draft, seeking to craft a strong foundation beneath a methodical build-out that would sustain itself over a longer period of time. The team's early success has surprised even its execs, who must now decide whether to go all in (sorry) on a bid for a playoff berth and a possible postseason run, or to stay the course and cash in (sorry again) on impending unrestricted free agents such as Jonathan Marchessault, James Neal, David Perron and Luca Sbisa.
Nobody asked us, but we'd roll the dice (not sorry). Making the playoffs just got harder in the Western Conference with the addition of the Golden Knights, and it wasn't anywhere near easy to earn a postseason berth before Vegas joined the NHL. In Marc-Andre Fleury, the Golden Knights have a goaltender who has played for three Stanley Cup championship teams, and as we've seen repeatedly in this salary cap era, if you can get in, you can win.
Go for it.
