Washington Capitals vs Islanders: What We Have Learned Through Two Games
By CJ Witt
The Capitals cannot play a full sixty minutes
This is one of those statements that kind of frustrate me. It’s hard to play a great game for sixty minutes. A sports game, no matter what game you’re playing has mountains and valleys. Momentum swings in games and you try to wrestle it back if you lose it.
That being said, the Capitals don’t seem to care to play sixty minutes. This team, for the entire season has seemed to be content in playing 20-30 minutes and hoping that would be enough. With the amount of talent this team has, on a lot of nights playing that amount of time was good enough. It was clearly enough, in the regular season they won 41 of the 69 games they played using this mindset.
This won’t work in the playoffs. If you fall behind it’s going to be a lot harder to come back. As good as it is to have a mindset that you can come from behind, it’s not as easy in the playoffs. You can probably pick on a bad San Jose Sharks team in the regular season to make historic comebacks, but great teams will lock it down. That’s who is in the playoffs, great teams.
If you get an early lead and play iffy defense these great teams will mount comebacks. That’s what seemed to happen in game two vs the Islanders. The Capitals came out flying, scored a goal in less than a minute, continued to put on pressure. Then the Islanders got their footing and never looked back. The Capitals had a +9 edge in shots attempts more than halfway through the first period. After the period ended New York had a +3 edge in the same stat.
In game two the Capitals played well for about 10-12 minutes then it was mostly New York. The Capitals had small stretches throughout the game to pull the possession numbers closer, but they never looked super threatening.
This goes hand and hand with what we mentioned before. The Islanders will work and play hard all game. Washington has got to match that and play for longer than 10, 15 or 30 minutes. They have got to find a way to play as close to a 60 minute game as possible. You know the Islanders will, Washington has to match that.