Caps Surprise Avalanche, 5-3
Written by DCist contributor Eli Resnick.
Apparently, we are all on drugs. There is no other simple explanation for the collective hallucination that has overtaken all three people paying attention to the Washington Capitals' game late last night against the Colorado Avalanche. No, the rink didn't fall off its mountain, and no, Ray Bourque did not appear to the crowd in an Avs uniform, hipcheck Ovechkin and score a hat-trick.
Instead, something much stranger seemed to happen. The Caps won.
This is highly illogical. We're talking about a team picked by most hockey publications to finish last overall beating a team with decent odds of winning the Stanley Cup. This is a game that's supposed to be over before it starts, with Colorado taking fifty shots to the Caps' thirty, Washington taking twice as many penalties as they try to keep up with a much faster Colorado club, and the heroics of geriatric goaltender Olaf "Godzilla" Kolzig keeping the game from becoming a complete blowout.
What actually happened was that Colorado did take forty-eight shots to the Caps' thirty and Washington did take more than twice as many penalties as they tried to keep up with a much faster Colorado club. However, the heroics of Kolzig kept Colorado from ever holding a lead as the Caps spun and skated like frantic little plastic table-hockey men controlled by a frantic drunk guy who knows he's playing the master, but prefers to go down flailing.
There were sequences of play where the Capitals defensemen, traditionally unable to get a puck out of their own zone in less than three minutes, got the puck up to center ice four times in one minute. Each time, the Caps' forwards laid that puck proudly at the feet of Colorado's defensemen, who stayed at their own blueline, and golfed it ahead for their forwards to go on a quick rush. The Avs forwards would then take shot that just barely missed, and let the eager, tail-wagging Caps bring the puck back. It was like watching a puppy who has finally learned to fetch, but still occasionally gets hit by the frisbee. This was better than what we've come to consider typical "Caps hockey," wherein the Avalanche would have kept the puck in the zone for the entire minute, passing between Washington's defensemen's legs, and helping them up when they fell down, but it was still within reason.
Then the world stopped making sense. Mike Green, the Caps star minor-league defenseman, who is expected to show signs of someday belonging in the NHL by the end of this season, went on a breakaway, faked the goalie all the way down to the ice and three feet to the left of the net, turned right and stickhandled the puck all the way over the goal-line. From there on out, Washington fans experienced the best acid trip we've been on since Alexander Ovechkin scored "the goal." More incredible than a player backhanding a shot through traffic while gliding head-first, flat on his back, the Capitals held on to a lead. On the road. Against Colorado. And won.
Expect the Caps to lose the next three games of their West Coast trip, as they take on three more amazing teams, including the last two Stanley Cup runners-up and the team that just bought the league's best goalie. If you didn't know, you heard it here first. These next three games will all be catastrophic losses. Otherwise, expect not to hear from your faithful hockey correspondent for "about twenty-eight days."