No shootout, but a big OT win for the Caps over Vancouver on Wednesday night, and Nic Dowd was still feeling it when he joined The Junkies Thursday for his weekly visit…and waiting for another goal to come in the final minute of a period.
“It’s always tough to give goals up at the end of the period, but for them it goes the same way; it’s one of those things where you'd love to score a goal going into the period, feel good about yourself and it kind of puts the other team back on their heels, and it pisses coaches off and puts people in bad moods,” Dowd said. “Same goes for us, right? We score one, it’s great, we go into the period with the lead, and they tie it up with 30 seconds left on the power play.”
But hey, the OT winner was theirs, and it was a sweet play by Aliaksei Protas that led to a bunny of a game-winner for Pierre-Luc Dubois.
“I’m guessing probably what happened was they saw Pro on a bit of a break, but they also probably saw Miller back, handling him and keeping in the outside, and then he dropped his stick, and I'm guessing the other two guys, probably a little bit of a mistake, but I'm guessing that they probably saw our guys changing and they assumed that they could probably jump Pro and create a bit of an outnumbered situation,” Dowd said. “He was just able to make a great play and, and it kind of left Dubes all alone, and then Dubes finished it off.”
The win continued a rollercoaster that has seen the Caps go 6-4-2 in their last 12, not winning or losing too many in a row but seemingly not able to get it going for too long – and on the end of the period tip, Dowd attributes that to sluggish starts.
“I don't think our starts have been great, and for lack of a better word, I think we've kind of got a little casual at times. We had so much success the first 20-something games of the season, scoring a ton of goals, and everyone was playing their best hockey, which is rare,” Dowd said. “It’s rare for a team to start the season off that hot, with almost all 20 guys that are in the lineup playing some of their best hockey all together, but we were just all playing very well at the beginning of the year, and it showed. You’re always gonna have lumps throughout the season, and you're not gonna play your best hockey for all 82 games, but that's why you hope to build a team that's deep enough to where when you do have slumps like this. But I think to get out of that, it's just that you're gonna have to lean back into the work. It’s hard to score in this league, and teams now know that we're one of the better teams in the league, so I feel like we have a target on our back, and we have to understand that that's kind of what we're going up against every night.”
A big difference from last year where the team snuck into the playoffs, but such is life when the hunters become the hunted.
“As you have some success over 20-25 games, and you kind of start putting teams on notice and the analytics show that it's not just a fluke, you create that stigma that this is who we are and how we play, and we expect success,” Dowd said. “Last year was such a grind at all times, and we are doing our best to win hockey games but it was really challenging to score goals at times. This year has kind of been the complete opposite, but now that we've done that, we have to continue to do it and can't take our foot off the pedal, because teams know that coming into the game. Last year maybe we had opportunities to surprise people because we weren't playing our best hockey at times, and that showed in our season, but once you create that atmosphere of success, it's something that you gotta continue to push for all 82 games. It's tough to be consistent, but that's the goal.”