The Capitals kicked off Tuesday’s NHL “Frozen Frenzy,” the first of 16 games that started every 15 minutes seeing them lose 4-1 to Toronto to drop to 1-3-1 on the year. It’s a quick turnaround to puck drop in New Jersey tonight, but head coach Spencer Carbery was up bright and early after a quick night’s sleep to give the Junkies his usual Wednesday visit.
And it was a subdued one, as you might expect, as Carbs had little time to look back on last night before prepping for the Devils.
“It’s not the way we want to draw it up; we’re just struggling to score goals right now. Doing some good things from a controlling the game standpoint, and a lot of things within the game to create opportunities to score, it just hasn't gone our way thus far,” Carbery said. “Usually you go through that at certain points in the year, but it’s just a little bit more frustrating because it's right out of the gate. It’s not fun for anybody, and we have to find a way to not feel sorry for ourselves and dig ourselves out of it.”
Of course, even with a new system, you couldn’t see these struggles coming, especially after a preseason that looked strong, but quite a few big Capitals are still scoreless.
“We’re real snake bitten, and like I said, usually that comes with a few players at a time, that's always gonna happen,” Carbery said. “If every guy is feeling it, you're probably going on a pretty good run, but right now, we just cannot find the back of the net with our entire group.”
The one bright spot in that, which is two-fold, is Alex Ovechkin finally lit the lamp for the first time this year, and did so on the Caps’ first power-play goal of the year.
“He was dominant last night, I thought, right from that first power play. Just an attack mindset, and you could tell right away he was not deferring in any opportunity that he got,” Carbery said. “He was attacking and setting the tone for our group, and I thought going back through the film that was one of our best games, and we lose 4-1. So you go, ‘what the hell,’ but he drove that; right away from the start of the game, the shot volume, attacking, getting to the net. Even the goal that was disallowed, he was barreling in there, ready to go through the wall to get that puck across the line.”
Computer analytics do say the Capitals are the second unluckiest team in the league in terms of shots and what they should be scoring – PDO is the stat, and it’s 0.945 for them – and Carbery explained the stat to the guys, but
“At the end of the day, you’re losing games or not hitting that target of expected goals, and then you're giving up more than what's expected,” Carbery said. “It’s a broken record, but the frustrating part of it, especially for our guys. When you're trying to do the right things, playing the right way, digging in and doing all these things that we're asking, and you're not rewarded, it's extremely frustrating. We just have to find a way, find something that sparks us and gets us going, and turns our year around a little bit to give our group some confidence and give us a little bit of swagger.”
Take a listen to Coach Carbs’ entire hit above, where he also goes in-depth on a few plays from Tuesday, discusses Darcy Kuemper’s start and backup Hunter Shepard making his NHL debut tonight, the difficulty of back-to-back games, and more!
