2018-19 NHL Season Thread - Caps were not suck last year edition

Ishad said:

I haven’t watched enough of this series to know if the Stars pk is really good or if Nashville’s pp is just trash.

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Think Nashville had the worst PP in the league during the regular season, but might be thinking of someone else.

Didn't want us to be the LAST game of Round 1.

Vandyn said:

Haha agreed. I told you we were going to be a pain in the ass.

As far as G7, I feel like at this point the Canes are playing with house money. Most would not have expected this to go 7 games, much less winning it. Plus they've been playing these last 3-4 games down basically 3 fowards. There's an chance that both Svech and Ferland will return for game 7 as well. We'll see what happens.

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I agree you guys are playing with house money, I expect Game 7 to be close. It's interesting how much people bring up Carolina's injuries, and not that they're not big, cause Svech is one of your better scorers...but not sure any of them are the caliber of us having Kempny get hurt a little before the playoffs and Oshie being out for the whole playoffs now.

Vandyn said:

I think the difference is in some ways it hurts the Canes more due to depth. Caps have enough depth across the entire lineup at least somewhat mitigate the loss to Oshie. When someone like a Svechnikov goes down, we have to replace him with an AHL player with no playoff experience (barely any NHL experience). Add in a couple more injuries (Ferland is a good forward for the Canes) and the problem is compounded.

Not saying the Caps injuries don't matter, they do. Oshie is a big part of your offense and it sucks he got hurt.

Just as an aside, there's a somewhat famous section at PNC Arena (section 328) that always is tweeting stuff, tailgating, doing events, etc. Just a group of die hard season ticket holders. I thought this was a nice touch.

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We *should* have enough depth to mitigate the loss of Oshie, but we really don't. Wilson has done all right in the series, but Kuznetosv, Vrana, Burakovsky, Eller...none have really stepped up. Connolly has at least scored in the last 2 games, but a lot of our top 6/9 has not shown up in this series...it's pretty much been Ovechkin and Backstrom carrying the majority of the load.

The fact we had to call up DSP from the AHL to plug into the bottom 6 (since we had to elevate someone from the bottom 6 to top 6 with Oshie out) kind of shows that we aren't getting the help from bottom 6 like we did on the Cup run last year. Boyd, Stephenson, DSP have all be interchangeable on the 4th line and you've barely noticed a difference. Last year Stephenson contributed throughout the lineup as we had short term absences of Backstrom and Wilson during the Penguin/Tampa series, and lost Kuznetsov for part of a game in the Finals.

Kempny is an altogether bigger loss, its resulted in Carlson having to play on his wrong side for parts of the series b/c we can't really trust guys like Orpik/Djoos/Siegenthaler with top 4 minutes. I guess I'd say we should have more depth, but far too much of it haven't performed up to what they can. It might end up seeing you guys upset us in 7, or Ovechkin/Backstrom will have to do something huge in order to carry us (maybe Holtby too, I think he's been mostly good since Game 2, just the victim of most of the weird bounces/goals in the series).