Friday musings...

A couple of notes about the Caps this morning...

1. Lepisto could benefit from greatly from pressure drills. You know like a drill where rushing forwards scream obscenities at him and throw ground beef at his feet while he tries to move the puck with a pair chopsticks.

2. The Caps keep getting burned by guys coming out of the penalty box.

3. If the Caps need to dish a forward to a team with some more proven puckhandling d-men, call Doug Risebrough of the Wild.

4. Steckel seemed to move his feet last night better than games past. He still took a hooking penalty in the 2nd but he was playing with some giddiyup.

5. Is a regular season pointless knowing that there's a juggernaut waiting from the West that pounds opponents, even when the play badly, like veal piccata?

Getting the ugly win... for a change

Unlike past grinder games, the Caps finally finished one out tonight. I was poised for a really depressing Islander-like, come-from-ahead-to-lose, loss. This is one of the games they have to win if they want to threaten for a playoff spot. They have shown in the last month that they match up well with teams that want to run and gun, but continue to lose to teams who play around the periphery and between the blue lines. I give as examples, the last Islanders game... er, every Islanders game, most games versus the Panthers, and even the Bruins game last week where the Caps are clearly more talented, have grit but cannot put the other guys away.

That mojo changed tonight as the Caps' grinders out-grinded the Avs. It was a fairly boring game, but screw it. Olie played like he's worth 5.5 mil, Steckel scored, Bradley had a 4 second fight.... what's not to like? We've had a dearth of garbage goals around here, it's time to make up for all the lost goals that Pettinger, Kozlov, and the rest of secondary scoring hasn't provided. Viva la garbage!