Four Point Weekend For Capitals

Mike Green scores in 8th straight game on February 14, 2008.
Photo by Chris O'Meara / Associated Press.

The Washington Capitals picked up four points in the standings over the weekend, beating both the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Florida Panthers. Although outscoring their two opponents by a combined score of 9-3 in the back to back wins seems impressive in itself, that isn't the whole story.

A quick glance at the scoring summary for Saturday's 5-1 victory over the Lightning shows the Capitals taking control in the first period with one goal each from Alexander Semin, Alex Ovechkin and Shaone Morrisonn. However, the real story of this game came in the second period when 23 year old Mike Green broke the consecutive game scoring streak record for an NHL defenseman during a power play. Taking over for the starting Tampa Bay netminder Mike McKenna after the first period, Karri Ramo is the one who goes in the history books as the goalie who was in net when Green scored a goal in his eighth straight game. The previous record of seven games was accomplished by Boston Bruin Mike O'Connell back in 1984. Halfway through the second, Ryan Malone got the lone goal for the Lightning. Washington's young forward Eric Fehr scored the final goal at 13:31 in the third period. With 31 stops in his very first NHL game, the winning goalie for the Capitals was 20 year old Michal Neuvirth. Recently acquired via waivers, defenseman Staffan Kronwall also made his debut as a Wahington Capital.

The Caps' scoring dominance carried over into their 4-2 win over goalie Tomas Vokoun and the Panthers on Sunday. The only bad news in review of this past weekend shows up in the penalty summary, as Washington out infractioned the Panthers 8-3. They are among the league leaders in minor penalties. Thankfully, Washington's penalty killing was working really well yesterday. Florida's two goals came from Michael Frolik who scored his 14th of the season in the second period, and Nathan Horton when he got his 16th on a power play at the beginning of the third. Eric Fehr got his 9th of the season just 30 seconds into the second period, his 6th even strength goal this month, which leads the league. The man who started and ended the goal scoring in this game was unsurprisingly Alex Ovechkin. Ovechkin's first of the game came on the power play at 15:38 in the opening period. Ovi hit net again with 2:31 left in the third. Then he completed the hat trick with just 19 seconds left in the game on a no look defensive zone clearing backhanded flip of the puck, which went in the net for his 41st goal of the season. Jose Theodore went the distance with 31 saves overall.

This weekend's stats include an awful lot of offensive pride inducing numbers for Caps fans. Ovechkin is now running away with the lead in goals overall with 41, while Green leads all defenseman with an amazing 22 goals so far. Meanwhile, Nicklas Backstrom went past the 100 mark in career assists with 102. Keep looking through the stats and you'll keep finding more to smile about.