March 26 vs. Utah Mammoth at Delta Center
Time: 9:00 p.m.
TV: MNMT
Radio: 106.7 THE FAN/Caps Radio Network
Washington Capitals (35-28-9)
Utah Mammoth (37-29-6)
Two nights after opening a three-game road trip with a 3-0 loss to the Blues in St. Louis, the Caps fly further west to take on the Utah Mammoth Thursday night in Salt Lake City in the middle match of the journey.
On a night in which the Caps finally got some help from around the League on the out-of-town scoreboard, they weren’t able to take advantage Tuesday in St. Louis. Instead of moving a couple of points closer to a playoff berth, the Caps merely took another game off the schedule, which is down to just 10 games remaining now, and with seven of them to be played on the road.
Blues goaltender Joel Hofer notched his sixth shutout of the season on Tuesday, stopping all 21 shots sent in his direction. Hofer is one of the few goalies in the League who is currently running hotter than Washington’s own Logan Thompson; the Blues’ goalie improved to 6-0-2 since the Olympic break; he has two shutouts, a miniscule 1.34 GAA and a sparkling .959 save pct. in his last eight starts.
Thompson permitted two or fewer goals against for the eighth time in his last 12 starts, again giving his team a chance to win. But Washington’s offense has been stuck in neutral for an extended period of time now. Excluding empty-net goals, the Caps have been held to two or fewer goals scored in 10 of their last 11 games; they’re 4-5-2 through that stretch only because of excellent goaltending from Thompson and Charlie Lindgren.
“I thought tonight our puck play was not good for majority of the night,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “We just could not execute. Anytime there was a glimmer of hope you saw – whether it was an odd man rush in the first period or an [offensive] zone sequence where some guys are open – we just couldn't connect on those plays whatsoever tonight.
“So that's where it leaves you, with our expected goals are probably around like 1.1 which isn't good enough. We just have to do a better job with the puck. We’ve got to do a better job creating opportunities, creating high danger, creating secondary looks, getting to the net, attacking the net, getting shots through, connecting our passes.”
Washington has wasted some strong goaltending from Thompson this season; he has lost nine games (0-5-4) in which he has yielded two or fewer goals against. Last season, Thompson won 31 of his 46 starts in his first season with the Capitals. This season, despite a career high 50 starts thus far – third-most in the NHL and a single-season personal best – Thompson has emerged victorious in just under half of those starts (24-20-6).
“Yeah, sometimes you tip your hat to Hofer; he's been great for them all year, and had a good game tonight,” says Thompson. “It seems like kind of every time that we would get a good look, we just couldn't really execute. And I think with them, we just maybe gave them a little too much time. They have a lot of skilled players on that team and they make some good plays to the middle, and that hurts us, right? You’ve got to get a stick on it or something; you can’t let teams go east-west, and I think they're really good at that, and they exposed us twice on it tonight.”
St. Louis entered Tuesday’s game with 67 points, a dozen fewer than the Caps, and the lowest total among any of Washington’s opponents over its last 11 games. But the Capitals’ ongoing offensive woes are making every game a significant struggle, and it’s making every goal against feel like a significant hurdle to overcome.
With 25 goals in their last 11 games, the Caps rank dead last in the NHL across that span. Their total of 16 goals at 5-on-5 in those 11 games is also last in the League.
“Obviously, we’re not doing enough to create and score goals,” says Caps center Dylan Strome. “Myself, I haven’t scored in two months, it feels like, and it’s just not good enough. We’ve got to find ways to score goals; that’s our job. We get paid money to score goals and help set up goals, and right now our team is having trouble – myself included – of scoring and finding the right plays to execute.
“It definitely helps when you get guys going to the net, and we talked about that going into the third, but we’ve just got to execute better, and we’ve got to find a way to finish. We’ve scored two or less goals in 10 of our last 11, right? That’s not going to cut it in this League, no matter how good LT or Chucky is. We’ve been grinding out games defensively, but you’ve got to score goals in this League to win, and obviously right now we’re not doing a good enough job of that.”
Earlier this month on home ice, the Caps dropped a 3-2 decision to Utah in the second game of the 11-game stretch in which Washington’s offense has been dormant. With 79 points, the Caps are six points shy of a playoff berth in the Eastern Conference. With 80 points, Utah is sitting in the first wild card slot in the Western Conference.
At plus-22 on the season, the Mammoth is one of just five Western Conference clubs with a positive goal differential. The franchise is in its second season in Salt Lake City after the Arizona Coyotes picked up stakes and moved to Utah last season. In the Coyotes’ last dozen seasons in Arizona, the team made just a single playoff appearance, and that one came in the expanded playoff field of 24 teams when the postseason was conducted in the late summer of 2020. The last time the franchise won a playoff series was in 2012.
The Mammoth started the season strong, winning seven straight games in October. Utah has been essentially a .500 team (29-27-6) since the end of that early season winning streak.
Thursday’s game concludes a four-game homestand for the Mammoth, which is looking to even up after sandwiching losses to Anaheim and Edmonton around an overtime victory over Los Angeles in the first three games of the homestand.
