With a 2-1 victory over the Columbus Blue Jackets on Saturday night at Capital One Arena, the Caps closed out their preseason with an impressive 5-1-0 record. But in the process, a couple of their blueliners sustained injuries which may affect the team\u2019s opening night lineup.<\/p>\n
Matt Roy (upper body) and Dylan McIlrath (lower body) both left the game in the third period. As a result, John Carlson skated 10:33 in the third, Martin Fehervary logged 9:40, Rasmus Sandin skated 7:55 and Declan Chisholm picked up 7:40.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll evaluate them [Sunday],\u201d says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t look like it\u2019s super significant or a long-term thing, but maybe a week, two weeks. I don\u2019t know. I don\u2019t want to throw anything out there, so we\u2019ll evaluate them [Sunday].\u201d<\/p>\n
Following a scoreless first frame, Chisholm and Pierre-Luc Dubois scored for Washington in the second, giving Logan Thompson all the offense he would need on this night. But down to four defensemen midway through the third, the Caps had to sweat out some anxious moments when Columbus scored on a late power play with goaltender Elvis Merzlikins pulled for an extra skater in a 6-on-4 situation.<\/p>\n
Thompson finished the night with 29 saves; the only blemish on his evening was Mathieu Olivier\u2019s power-play goal on a rebound with 1:46 left in the game. Thompson and his teammates snuffed out the remainder of the late Blue Jackets uprising.<\/p>\n
Chisholm continued his strong preseason showing with his first goal of the preseason; he picked up a pair of assists \u2013 including one on the power play \u2013 earlier in the preseason. Ryan Leonard ignited the scoring play by doing power forward things; he carried into Columbus ice, fought off two successive checks while staying upright, then put a feed to the middle for linemate Ivan Miroshnichecnko, who wisely and neatly bumped it to the weak side for Chisholm. From the inside of the left circle, the blueliner ripped a shot past Merzlikins for a 1-0 Washington lead at 2:38 of the middle frame.<\/p>\n
Midway through the middle frame, Tom Wilson sent Dubois on a 2-on-1 rush with Connor McMichael available to his left. From the inside top of the right circle, Dubois fired a dart past Merzlikins on the stick side for a 2-0 Caps lead at 10:03.<\/p>\n
Before biting the hand that once fed him, Dubois rang the crossbar on his first shift of the night, half a minute into the game.<\/p>\n
\u201cI get one shot a game, they told me,\u201d quips Dubois. \u201cI shot two in the first, so I thought my game might be over there. They told me to shoot it next time, so that\u2019s exactly what I did.\u201d<\/p>\n
Columbus held the Caps without a shot on goal over the remainder of the second period following the Dubois goal.<\/p>\n
Six of Thompson\u2019s last 17 stops came on the Columbus power play, which finally broke through when Olivier buried a rebound of an Adam Fantilli shot in the game\u2019s penultimate minute. Minutes earlier, Thompson thwarted Fantilli in a 1-on-1 situation off the rush to preserve his shutout.<\/p>\n
Twice in the first and once in the third, Thompson was able to make tricky stops look easy by finding and gloving shots from distance through a maze of traffic. He also made a pair key stops early in the third on Jackets winger Yegor Chinakhov, stopping him twice on the same shift.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe first game against these guys in Columbus [on Sept. 30], I was definitely fighting it a little bit more through traffic,\u201d says Thompson. \u201cI just made a little bit of an adjustment going into this game, and I think the forwards and the [defensemen], [the saves] may have looked difficult, but they made my life easy today, and I was able to get my eyes and track it today. I was able to get my eyes on most of those shots.\u201d<\/p>\n
Merzlikins robbed Wilson twice early in the third to keep the Jackets within striking distance. The first of those Wilson chances came on a sublime feed from Nic Dowd that gave Wilson a backhand look from the top of the paint.<\/p>\n
Now, it\u2019s on to the real deal, six months and 82 games worth of it. The Caps open their regular season right here at Capital One Arena on Wednesday against Boston.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a productive training camp, and the games gave us good opportunity to evaluate,\u201d says Carbery. \u201cIt also threw some challenges at us with the injury stuff with some guys like [Alex Ovechkin] not playing until late in the preseason and practicing into camp. That has a ripple effect on who\u2019s playing with who and chemistry with the lines.<\/p>\n
\u201cOverall, I was happy with the way that camp went.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"With a 2-1 victory over the Columbus Blue Jackets on Saturday night at Capital One Arena, the Caps…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":190864,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-190863","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nhl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/190864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}