In addition, despite actually outshooting the Bruins, the Capitals couldn’t solve the enigma of Tim Thomas in net.

“Tim Thomas won a Stanley Cup playing like that last year,” said OFB TV guest Ed Frankovic.

Watch Frankovic, Ted Starkey, and yours truly discuss what adjustments the Capitals will have to consider if Laich is out of the lineup for an extended period of time and also Dmitry Orlov’s bad puck luck.

Without Alex Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom, and Mike Green, this Capitals team is surprisingly similar to the Capitals of almost a decade ago… a hard-charging team that both delighted and frustrated its fans.

How so, you ask? Read on… and while these comparisons are far from perfect, consider them food for thought:

It’s not a perfect match; the old-school Caps had no Karl Alzner, nor a spark-plug like Matt Hendricks, nor a promising young defenseman like Dmitry Orlov. Of course, that team of yore had a disenchanted but still-dangerous Jaromir Jagr—but the current Caps have Ovechkin… and however you feel about Ovie wearing the “C” he’s undoubtedly more deserving than Jagr was, and a wrecking-ball to boot.

Oh, and comparing the coaches falls down just a little bit… while Dale Hunter is another minor-league coach given his first NHL shot with the Caps, he kicks Butch Cassidy’s ass in pretty much every way.

When the 2011-12 team’s Robert Lang (Nicklas Backstrom) and Sergei Gonchar (Mike Green) return from injury, this roster can compete with any in team in the league. The team going through trying times with a depleted roster will build their chemistry and resolve come playoff time.

This limping Capitals team has earned three points in two games, including a tilt against the defending champs… and that’s without three of their big stars. Adding back a healthy Ovechkin, Backstrom, and Green down the stretch improves the team dramatically — but in the meantime, a team forced to play without its superstars is also forced to play a balanced, team-focused game.

If Coach Hunter and the locker-room leaders enforce that team-first mentality when their superstars return… watch out, ’cause these Capitals will be dangerous.

We first learned of Mathieu Perreault’s deep-rooted love affair with playing hockey outdoors when we interviewed him after an outdoor Hershey Bears’ practice last season. Other Capitals share his passion for sure, but few find themselves in Matty’s circumstances late in 2010: recently recalled by the Caps, auditioning game by game for retention with the parent club and wondering, literally day by day, if he’ll be a participant in what is perhaps the biggest game in Capitals’ history — the 2011 Winter Classic at Heinz Field. So we approached MP85 and asked him if he’d share with us a diary of his reflections and emotions about playing hockey outdoors as a youth and potentially being a part of this year’s Winter Classic. Below is Matty’s first diary entry, and we’ll hear from him again this week and after the big game — assuming he’s in it and assuming it doesn’t get rained out.

You can read more of Perreault’s diary entries here and here. Perhaps most compelling in light of last night’s hat trick, however, was Matty’s closing line from the first entry: “This game in Pittsburgh means so much to me. It is day to day for me, but I feel really good about my game. I really think I am going to get there.”

Well, Matty, if making the roster this year showed you “got there,” Tuukku Rask’s climbing goals against average on Tuesday should have cleared any additional doubt. It’s  a great case of Perreault’s hard work bearing more fruit. Sure, his game Tuesday could have been even better, since he took two penalties, one on which Boston scored. But he stepped up when his team needed him.

In the video below you’ll find OFB’s three stars of the Capitals’ 5-3 win, a game where the guys in red showed they could match the reigning Stanley Cup champions even with key offensive players like Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom out of the lineup.

Also, in case you missed the celebration on the jumbotron after Cody Eakin’s goal, it consisted of footage of someone I’ll admit I’ve thought for awhile is Eakin’s long lost twin: Shaun White.  Eakin told OFB after the game that while he didn’t know beforehand that they’d play the Shaun White clips, he’s OK with the comparison.

“He’s got good style and good hair,” Eakin said.

Photo Caption: Photo by Clyde Caplan, clydeorama.com

How much do NHL athletes and coaches rely on stats—versus their eyes and game film— to tell them about a player or his performance?

The stats part of the question was alluded to a few weeks ago in a radio interview Capitals forward Brooks Laich did on The Sports Junkies, where they briefly discussed statistics and what Laich thinks of their application to the game. The hockey community in general has plenty of dissension about whether stats or eyes should be the bottom line when it comes to measuring a player’s performance.

It’s striking, in fact,  that statistics are often treated with more reverence by everyone except the people who actually play the game. That’s been my experience, at least, with the Capitals. While some players occasionally reference stats when responding to questions (see again: Laich, Brooks), there’s often a take-a-grain-of-salt attitude towards stats—particularly personal ones—in players’ attitudes when stats are brought up by media members in locker-room scrums.

So I asked two Caps players and a coach what they thought. Stats devotees will probably discount my analysis because of the small sample size I pooled. That’s fair. I’m working with variables (actually, it’s more like a constant) such as time and, well, not having enough of it.

But note how Washington Capitals forward Dennis Wideman frames his answer to the stats sheet vs. eyes question.

“Among ourselves—everyone else looks at stats, everything else is based on stats—but among ourselves, we know there’s games where a guy could be best player on the ice but doesn’t get a goal, or doesn’t get a point, he had four or five scoring chances and the goalie just made great saves,” Wideman said when asked how much he felt stats reflected a player’s game or ability. “Then there’s other games where you feel like you played terrible and had two or three points. It reflects somewhat, but also sometimes you play really, really good but you had nothing to show for it that way.”

Brooks Laich says his assessment of his game ultimately relies on how he feels.

“I’m going to trust how I feel on the ice, and whether or not I did a job to help us win,” Laich said. “They’re [statistics are] not gonna lie, but they’re not gonna tell you the entire truth. … You can read into them what you want. Ultimately, as players, I don’t think many guys really actually care that much about their stats. They just want to feel good about their game.”

Callups present another interesting angle on the stats vs. eyes question, since often the coaches aren’t in the position to evaluate a player in person.

Capitals assistant coach Dean Evason said the coaches will look at stats to see if a guy’s involved in the offense—goals and assists—but that they’ll rely heavily on conversations with the player’s coaches ( in the Capitals’ case, AHL Hershey Bears head coach Mark French) to see who’s hot.

There’s a lot of trust between the Capitals and their AHL affiliate. Even with that, however, Capitals head coach Dale Hunter took a trip down to Hershey with less than two months under his belt as Capitals head coach so that he could get his own thought process going about the guys he saw on the ice.

“Stats are going to tell you trends,” Laich explained. “They can be useful, but I don’t think you should absolutely rely on them.”

Sometimes, in fact, they’re downright misleading. Evason gave an example with faceoff stats:

“It varies from rink to rink,” he said. “A lot of times, our center iceman will win the faceoff back, they’ll get possession of it, and that center iceman doesn’t get credit for the win. Whereas for us, if Jeff Halpern wins it back, and our guy gets beat to the puck, that’s not his [Halpern’s] fault. He’s done his job.  And it’s such an individual stat, but yet some rinks will view it as more of a team stat. So there is variation from team to team. I don’t know if there’s a specific structure to each one, or that everyone in the league says, ‘If it’s possession on a faceoff, then it’s  a win.’”

Laich summed it up: “I’m not worried about my stats during the game, I’m not worried about them after. The only stat I might concern myself with is ice time. I want to get shots, I want to win faceoffs, I want to strip pucks and that sort of stuff, but I’m not too concerned about that.”

Evason had a different twist on how much he thinks the players concern themselves with stats: contract disputes. He brought it up as part of his discussion on the discrepancies in stats from rink to rink.

“A guy’s gonna complain, because they can use it in their contract disputes, and it can be used against them. So they’re very conscious of it, obviously,” he said.

What about the coaches themselves?

Evason confirmed that he’ll trust his eyes more than the stats sheet when it comes down to it.

“We put not a lot of stock into it, but yet, there are some that you look at that you take into consideration,” Evason said. “We’re more, as a coaching staff, we’re more concerned of making mistakes on the ice. … We’ll know if Troy Brouwer isn’t hitting one night.”

Of course, eyes can miss things the first time around. The more helpful tool, gleaned from the conversation with Evason, seems to be rewatching game tape. Evason said, for example, that watching a game, it will look like one player wasn’t hitting, but when the coaching staff goes back and rewatches the entire game again the next morning, they can change their opinion.

“So there’s a lot of times we sit in there, and we think we’ve done one thing, but we’ve actually done the other after we can sit down and evaluate,” Evason said.

In fact, that time to evaluate is so important that the coaches aren’t too concerned with talking to players about the performance immediately after the game.

“That’s why we don’t put a whole lot of stock after a game – we don’t go in and talk to the guys. We want to  just wait, reflect on the game, what we saw, and then watch the tape obviously. It doesn’t lie,” Evason said.

Evason also said that the coaches will evaluate scoring chances (music to a stats-lover’s ears); however, Evason has worked under three different head coaches in Washington and says everyone has their own version of what a scoring chance is.

Hunter, for example, has his preferred stats method of what Evason describes as “scoring chances for and against,” and who’s contributed “positively” to help the team get that chance for. When asked if it’s a known public method, Evason said it’s Hunter’s personal way to determine it.

“Every coach has a different eye for what a scoring chance is,” Evason said. “Comcast will put up that we’ve had so many scoring chances, and … we’ll be like, ‘No way we had 15 scoring chances,’ but it’s just because our thought process on scoring chances is different than whoever’s keeping them for them.”

It’s good to make one thing clear at this point: no one is arguing that stats don’t play a role in hockey analysis. Even I am not stupid enough to suggest that. But the impression I got from everyone was that they were willing to trust either what their eyes told them or how they felt they played after a game more than a stats sheet. Of course, the outlook or emphasis can vary slightly by coach. Laich remembers head coach Bruce Boudreau as being a “big stats guy” (though he didn’t specify as to how or whether that made Boudreau’s coaching different), something that would also come across in post-game press conferences.

Perhaps stats are just the crutches the rest of us need to keep up with these guys whose eyes and instincts have been honed by playing and watching this game at an elite talent level for so long. But when we incorporate and understand how they are looking at the game, which is definitely less stats-based than we’re wont to do, our analysis will be that much the better for it.

Losses like the Capitals suffered Tuesday—roughly 60 minutes of missed assignments and wandering aimlessly around the ice, everyone playing their own game instead of as a team—are difficult to report on.  The guys on the team are tired and know they played poorly. A few unlucky ones have to talk to the media about it; meanwhile, journalists are trying to figure out a polite but honest way to publicly ask about a humiliating job performance.

That’s why guys like Karl Alzner should be copied and placed in every NHL locker room.  While Alzner may be just as upset privately as the rest of the room about embarrassing losses, he’s willing to stand there patiently afterwards  and answer as many questions as the media can throw at him.  He will break down the game—even the unpleasant parts—and provide the same quality analysis that comes so much easier after a 3-0 win.

I write about this, rather than all of the things that went wrong in the 3-0 loss (let’s face it, just about everything went wrong), because I think it shows a strength of character that guys rarely get commended for. It’s kind of a thankless responsibility—being the mouthpiece of a team after a loss.  Those guys who are willing to give their best effort postgame to an interview even when they don’t feel like it should know that effort is appreciated.

Yes, I know it’s part of their job, and they’re getting paid a lot to do it. In the end, though, it’s really about both players and journalists serving the fans, because they’re going to be the ones looking for quotes from the players explaining things after a game.  And Karl Alzner makes everyone’s life a little easier this way.

By no means, of course, is Alzner the only guy who does this. Another player who often steps up to the plate that way—though he wasn’t out in the locker room last night after a loss—is Mike Knuble. It’s a talent to be able to stay polite while a whole bunch of people ask you why you were so bad at your job that evening or your coworkers were so bad at theirs. Knuble knows how to do this. If one had to construct a top line or top pairing for postgame interviews after blowouts, Knuble and Alzner would be right in the mix.

Overall, this may seem like a small thing to blog about. I’d agree the Capitals’ poor decisions on passing Tuesday and their even poorer special teams performance  (they gave up two power play goals and couldn’t capitalize on three man-advantages of their own) might warrant more concern. But with so much of today’s sports structure comprised of what happens off the ice or court or field, it’s become an aspect of an athlete’s job that can’t be overlooked. And in many ways, it’s a thankless role. But to the journalists who are desperately trying to do their job, it’s a blessing, and hopefully for the readers as well.

Chimera shot. Cam Ward made sure he missed.

But the rebound came out just in time for Orlov to reach back as he skated past the net, and stick the puck past Ward for his first NHL goal. The smile that flashed on Orlov’s face afterwards pretty much rendered the red goal light unnecessary.  And he put his team up 2-1, which would be the final score.

“Right then and there, you remember your first goal, when you scored your first NHL goal,” said Chimera, who had an assist and a hand in the initial on-ice celebration. “And it’s pretty cool. It’s a cool moment for him. … You wish you could have a camera at that point, ‘cause it’s priceless.”

Capitals forward Troy Brouwer chuckled when being asked about the expression of joy on Orlov’s face after the game.

“I think everyone’s that excited [about their first NHL goal], to be honest with you,” Brouwer said. “It’s such a huge accomplishment. We’re very proud of him.”

Chimera reflected on that first-goal reaction: “When you get your first, a lot of emotions go through your head, a lot of time spent getting there, so it’s a fun moment when you get it.”

Chimera also brought up, unsolicited, how hard Orlov had been working—a compliment in and of itself for the rookie.

It may be only one goal in a 82 (plus?) game season, but it took 20 years of hard work to make it happen. Hopefully more are on the way for the young defenseman.

Meanwhile, on the flip side of the game, team captain Alex Ovechkin had a hit that’s too good not to share on the Carolina Hurricanes’ Tuomo Ruutu, who could only be described as being at the wrong place at the wrong time on this one.  Pass the Tylenol, please.

There’s been a lot to focus on in Hershey.

While their NHL affiliate has gone through a systems makeover this season, there’s been a slight shift in strength of game down at Hershey as well.  Holtby described the team to OFB via a phone interview in December as more offensive-based than before, with the skill being up front.  It was also a much slower start to the season than the goaltender expected for himself (his current SAV% is 9.03, whereas last year he finished with a .920).

In fact, Holtby’s admitted bumpy start reveals a very different side to one of the stories that made a brief appearance on the national media scene last November; it also gives a glimpse into the kind of mentoring that coaches like Olie Kolzig (associate goaltending coach with the Capitals) are giving Holtby.

After a 3-2 shootout win against (who else?) the Baby Pens in late November, Holtby –who stopped 4 of 5 pucks in the shootout for the win—gave a series of fist pumps that took him to center ice. He wound up with a game misconduct, a brawl almost ensued, and Puck Daddy picked up the video (via Sweetest Hockey on Earth) with its usual doset of good-humored commentary.

Tim Leone for The Patriot News reported this quote from the Baby Pens on the incident:

“We were just upset, just the showboating,” WBS forward Zach Sill said. “We showed we weren’t happy with it. In our own barn, you don’t want that happening.”

Completely understandable. But after hearing Holtby reflect on the incident to OFB, the celebration, it turns out, seemed to come more from a place of relief–—a sort of personal catharsis. After the rougher-than-anticipated start to the season, Holtby finally felt in that game he played better.

But, even when going through personal struggles, you’re still part of a team, and that was the heart of what Kolzig stressed to the young goaltender afterwards. Holtby said Kolzig didn’t want to take away that it had been a rough road for the goaltender up until that point. But he reminded Holtby not to let individual celebrations get in the way of the team.

Coming from one player known for wearing his emotions on his sleeve to another, it sounds like good advice.  And it’s one more learning curve Holtby’s navigated this year.