Best player in the League might be a stretch, but Protas, who stands 6-foot-6 and weighs 250 pounds, has become one of the NHL’s most difficult players to defend and hold in check because of his combination of size, skating and awareness.<\/p>\n
The New York Rangers are next up with the task of trying to handle him. They host Washington at Madison Square Garden on Sunday (7 p.m. ET; MNMT, NHLN, MSG, SN1, TVAS).<\/p>\n
All eyes will again be on Capitals legend Alex Ovechkin<\/a> and his chase to become the first in NHL history to score 900 goals. He remains three away after failing to score in Washington’s first two games.<\/p>\n But don’t be surprised if Protas steals the spotlight.<\/p>\n “I’m telling you, he’s just scratching the surface on his career in this league,” Capitals coach Spencer Carbery said. “He’s such a horse, such a big guy that skates so well that’s now going to play on the power play this year.”<\/p>\n Carbery and the Capitals needed a performance like Protas gave them Saturday. It came two nights after a disappointing and somewhat ragged 3-1 season-opening loss to the Boston Bruins at home.<\/p>\n Washington outshot Boston 36-22 and Bruins goalie Jeremy Swayman<\/a> made 35 saves, but the Capitals went 0-for-5 on the power play and looked disjointed. Worse yet, a power-play goal from Boston forward David Pastrnak<\/a> in the third period was the game-winner.<\/p>\n Saturday was different.<\/p>\n “Tonight looked like us from last year,” goalie Logan Thompson<\/a> said. “We were confident, making plays, got a lead and played with it.”<\/p>\n Carbery gave Protas much of the credit.<\/p>\n “We just needed someone, for lack of a better term, to shoot it in the back of the net; that’s exactly what he did tonight,” Carbery said. “He got into a couple great areas and just snapped it right past their goaltender. We needed that.<\/p>\n \u201cI thought we outplayed Boston the other night at home. We only get one on the board, Swayman sort of stymies us a little bit, so we needed some guys in some scoring situations to score to beat a goalie, and he stepped up and scored a couple big goals.”<\/p>\n Martin Fehervary<\/a> scored on a rebound off Alexander Romanov<\/a> to give Washington a 1-0 lead at 1:50. Protas took over after that, scoring from between the circles with a waste-no-time shot past Sorokin’s blocker at 13:51 to make it 2-0.<\/p>\n Protas played the puck out of the corner to help create Ryan Leonard’s first goal of the season at 9:50 of the second period that gave Washington a 3-0 lead.<\/p>\n He then scored again to at 15:30, cashing in with a breakaway after Tony DeAngelo fumbled the puck at the Capitals’ blue line to extend the lead to 4-0.<\/p>\n “Good breakout,” Protas said of his second goal. “I think he fanned on it a little bit. It was wobbling, made a mistake. I mean, it happens to everybody. Good thing to capitalize. Tried to use my speed and capitalize.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Best player in the League might be a stretch, but Protas, who stands 6-foot-6 and weighs 250 pounds,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":207938,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[556],"tags":[64,63,575,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-207937","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\/207937","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=207937"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/207937\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/207938"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=207937"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=207937"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=207937"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}