Thoughts From The Weekend
New head coach Spencer Carbery & the Caps get spanked by the Penguins.
Hopes were high last Friday night as the Washington Capitals took the ice for an NHL season opener vs. their hated rival, the Pittsburgh Penguins. Since we had last visited with the Caps, the team had broken training camp with a few new faces.
2019 draftee Conor McMichael finds himself playing left wing on the second line with center Evgeny Kuznetsov and right wing Tom Wilson. I was a touched surprised to see McMichael make the roster, as my sources had told me that his performance with the AHL’s Hershey Bears had been underwhelming.
Matthew Phillips, acquired over the Summer from the Calgary Flames, is the third line right wing with center Dylan Strome and left wing Sonny Milano. It’s an interesting fit for the undersized winger, who did nothing but score goals in his minor league stint under contract with Calgary. It seems right for him to play alongside Strome and Milano, two free agent forwards the Caps signed on the cheap after they were cast away by the Chicago Blackhawks and the Anaheim Ducks.
Even with this welcome injection of youth into the lineup, the Capitals are still boast the second oldest lineup in the NHL, behind only the Penguins. But these are the compromises you need to make when you’re straining to stay competitive without pulling the trigger on a multi-year rebuild. And with Alex Ovechkin within hailing distance of Wayne Gretzky and his NHL career goal scoring record, you can hardly blame Caps General Manager Brian MacLellan for taking this direction.
And for at least one period on Friday night, it looked like MacLellan, Carbery and the Caps had something going on. The team moved the puck very well, dominating possession over Pittsburgh in the opening frame. The team was smoothly breaking out of its own defensive zone, and their offensive zone entries seemed effortless.
Unfortunately, there was something all too familiar about it too. After the first period, the game was scoreless. And as good as the Caps looked on the ice, there was nothing to show for it. It’s a movie Caps fans have seen before, one that usually ends with the Penguins capitalizing on a Washington mistake — and it’s what happened next.
In the second period, Evgeni Malkin turned an Alex Ovechkin turnover into the game’s first goal. Sidney Crosby scored twice on the power play before the end of the period to make it 3-0. Late in the third period, Malkin picked defenseman John Carlson’s pocket and found Reilly Smith with a long pass that the former Vegas Golden Knight turned into another goal to make it 4-0 and send the home fans streaming for the exits.
It was hardly an auspicious debut for Carbery, who will get a second chance at his first win as an NHL head coach tonight in D.C. when the Calgary Flames visit. While it’s obviously too early to write off this season, the team did seem awfully slow in the second and third periods, and Ovechkin, especially when he takes off his helmet, has never looked older — though he came within a hair’s breadth of checking Penguins defenseman Eric Karlsson into next week.
As I watched Friday night’s debacle, it was easy to see how much this season’s lineup resembled the team that stumbled through the last few weeks of last season after the trade deadline. There is some help on the way. Defenseman Joel Edmundson, who was injured in the preseason, will be back in a few weeks, as will winger Max Pacioretty. Both will help tremendously. But in the meantime, this Caps lineup still has something to prove.
Going into the weekend, it was hard not to confront Sunday’s game between the New York Jets and the Philadelphia Eagles with some dread. Sure, the Jets had managed to beat a dysfunctional Denver Broncos team on the road the week before, and had looked more than credible in a loss to the Kansas City Chiefs the week before that. Even better, second-year quarterback Zach Wilson, forced into the starting role after an opening night injury to Aaron Rodgers, was beginning to look more comfortable in the role. And if he was still having trouble operating in the red zone, at least he wasn’t looking totally out of place as he did earlier in the season.
Even Saturday Night Live has acknowledged the tale of woe that is the Jets, as was featured in a sketch about how Taylor Swift has impacted NFL coverage. According to Keenan Thompson, as he played Fox NFL Sunday host Curt Menefee, the Jets “were cursed by a warlock a thousand years ago and they can never experience joy.”
I seem to recall that Weekend Update host Michael Che is a Jets fan.
But after I settled in front of my television at 4:25 U.S. EDT to watch the game against my better judgement, something great happened: the Jets won. It wasn’t an epic comeback for the ages, and Wilson still needs to do a lot of growing up before he becomes a better quarterback, but it was a victory nonetheless.
While the Jets fell behind early, the defense was playing out of its mind (the Jets forced four turnovers, intercepting Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts three times) and the home team only trailed 14-12 with a little more than two minutes remaining in the game. That was when Jets safety Tony Adams intercepted Hurts and ran the ball back 45 yards to the Eagles 8-yard line. When the Eagles defense parted like the Red Sea to let Jets running back Breece Hall score an uncontested touchdown on the next play and give New York its first lead of the day and one they would never relinquish, it was impossible not to look at the clock and curse every one of the 110 seconds left in the game, time the Eagles could use to engineer a winning touchdown drive.
I immediately began ranting at the television, wondering out loud why Hall hadn’t simply fallen at the one-yard like to bleed more time off the clock before scoring and force the Eagles to burn a precious timeout. But I need not have worried. After the Jets converted a meaningless two-point conversion and the ensuing kickoff, the Eagles turned the ball over on downs, effectively ending the game.
After six weeks, the Jets are 3-3 and now head into a bye week. If you had told me the Jets would have managed to be at .500 without Aaron Rodgers, I would have said you were crazy. Yet here we are and I am now convinced we can make the playoffs.
Stay tuned, for there it is a certainty I will lose all hope once again.