The Washington Capitals dominated the Minnesota Wild in an impressive 5-1 win on Friday night. There wasn\u2019t much negative about the team\u2019s performance, other than that their margin of victory could have been even larger had their power play not continued its early-season struggles.<\/p>\n
While they did eventually pot a goal while up a man, it came well after the game had already been decided, off an accidental high-slot skate tip from Tom Wilson. The team ended the night 1-for-5 on the man advantage, bringing their total to 2-for-16 through five games, which ranks 27th in the NHL.<\/p>\n
Head coach Spencer Carbery commented postgame that, despite the late goal, he wasn\u2019t impressed with his club\u2019s power play and expanded on the specific reasoning after Saturday morning\u2019s practice.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe two areas that I evaluate our power play on \u2013 one is execution, so that\u2019s [when] we have the puck in possession, we take a shot, we make a pass, and it doesn\u2019t connect,\u201d Carbery said. \u201cWhether it hits shin pads or whether it goes off someone\u2019s stick. So the execution needs to be better without a doubt.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd then, the other piece is, are we doing the right thing? Sometimes, everything that Mullsy\u2019s (assistant coach Kirk Muller) talking about, you can do it all right, and then the execution is off. Or, your passing is great, but the plan is incorrect, guys are in the wrong spots, they\u2019re not running the right routes, they\u2019re not supporting or doing the things that we\u2019re asking them to do. I saw it as a little bit of both.\u201d<\/p>\n
Five games into last season, the Capitals found themselves in the exact same position. The 2024-25 Caps were just 2-for-18 and also ranked 27th in the league. After some ups and downs throughout the year, the Capitals eventually worked their way up to a 14th-place finish, scoring on 23.5 percent of their power-play opportunities.<\/p>\n
However, the team regressed down the stretch, including during the postseason, managing just three power-play goals on 22 chances, the worst conversion rate among teams that advanced past the first round. The nightmares of those failures likely lend to Carbery\u2019s desire for the team to solve their current issues while up a man.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s got to get better,\u201d Carbery said. \u201cWe\u2019ll continue to work on it. We worked on it today. We\u2019ll continue to talk about it. And we need to see better tomorrow without a question.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Capitals\u2019 next opponent is the visiting Vancouver Canucks on Sunday afternoon. The Canucks, so far this season, are a middling penalty-killing team, killing off 79 percent of opponents\u2019 power plays, ranking 18th in the league.<\/p>\n
In their last game against the Chicago Blackhawks, they allowed a Ryan Donato power-play strike in the first period of their eventual 3-2 shootout victory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Washington Capitals dominated the Minnesota Wild in an impressive 5-1 win on Friday night. There wasn\u2019t much…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":235882,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":["post-235881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nhl","tag-nhl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235881\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/235882"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}