Caps vs. Penguin Scum 3-24-2010 Post-Mortem

Here we go again...  Onto the Battle Damage Assessment...

THE GOOD:

• Alexander "Slappy" Semin with a shorthanded goal on an individual effort as pretty as you're ever going to see.  It was his second shorty on the season and just the fourth for the Caps this season.  The fact that it tied up the game at 2 in the third period was just icing on the cake.
• Mike Knuble doing what he does best, getting to the net and picking up garbage knoals.  It kind of makes us wonder why he bothers shooting from distance.  And let us stipulate that Bruce Boudreau looks like a genius for sending him out there in the gimmick.  Had Knuble missed and the Caps lost, Boudreau would have been hounded for sending out a guy who had never scored a goal in the gimmick.
• Jose "Alvin, Simon," Theodore had an outstanding game again tonight.  Not a whole lot he could do on the three goals he gave up and while you might want him to make a big save on the third goal late in the third period, he had just made some big saves in the sequence right before that one.
• Mike "BEAM ME UP" Green and Jeff "Sergeant" Schultz were +3 and +1 respectively.  For Schultz, it was his first plus game in 8 games.  

THE BAD:

• So the Caps are now 7-1 when allowing more than 40 shots on goal.  That's nothing to be proud of as the Caps were outshot tonight 42-32.
• Matt "Omar" Bradley and David "Bolt Cutter" Steckel were both a -2 tonight.  The Bolt Cutter can at least lean on his faceoff ability (though he was 6-7 tonight) to stay in the lineup, Omar can't.

THE UGLY:

• The game was decided by a gimmick.
• We realized early on that Paul Devorski and Ian Walsh were calling tonight's game as if it were a playoff game and they certainly did.  5 Power Plays for the Penguin Scum versus only 1 for the Caps.  We guess we should feel lucky that they didn't call it like a Game 7.

On the scale of 1 to 10, Caps-Penguin Scum games recently have had an intensity of about a 12.  Tonight it was more like a 6, maybe a 7.  For long stretches tonight, it really did seem like just another regular season game.  We're curious to see what the Penguin Scum media have to say about tonight's game (we've already heard Dan Bylsma's spin cycle and aren't impressed) because if this really was another top drawer effort from the Penguin Scum, they'll be easily dispatched in the Playoffs before they ever reach the Caps.  Once again the Penguin Scum blow a lead to the Caps.  Once again the Penguin Scum get blitzed by the Caps in the third period.  Yeah, yeah the playoff are a different animal but things like this have a way of catching up to you in the playoffs.  But for yet another night, the Caps picked up a win on pretty much talent alone.  That's not to say that the Caps played poorly or didn't have any intensity, they just didn't play tonight's game like their lives depended upon it as they usually do against the Penguin Scum.  We have no doubt that the Caps will ramp up the intensity come playoff time and should the Penguin Scum last enough to face the Caps again, the intensity will be cranked up to about 15.

It has been... A TWO POINT NIGHT!!!