Foegele was a man on a mission last night. Always in the action, skating hard, planted himself in front of the net like a power forward multiple times, made some great plays on D, etc.. If McGinn would have looked up, he could have hit Foegele for another 2 break-aways but missed him both times early in the game. Other than that, hard to complain.
Indeed. Foegele was unbelievable last night. He looked like a star player all night long. He could have easily scored another goal - Holtby had a stellar save on one of Foegele's breakaways. Foegele has always had a killer work ethic all year. Last night, he actually had good decision-making with the puck. He held onto it, he deked past defenders, he passed it when he was pressured, he waited to make plays. There wasn't the panic I'm accustomed to seeing with him. If he can figure it out, we have more than an Andrew Cogliano. I don't want to make a comparison and be let down, but tonight showed that Foegele perhaps could have what it take to get top 6 forward skill. That's huge. Don't knock he is a rookie and he just turned 23.
Holtby I thought was actually very good last night. I also noticed Nick Jensen positively, and, as much as I hate to say it, Brooks Orpik. Aside from that, the Caps completely gave up in the 2nd and 3rd periods. It was ridiculous, outrageous domination by the Canes. It wasn't close. Mrazek faced maybe 3 scoring chances all night. OK, Naturalstattrick says they had 4 high danger and we had 14. But yeah, what I loved to see most was we completely got in the Caps' heads. They couldn't get the puck out of their zone, they played so ludicrously slow, they stopped forechecking us and started camping out in the neutral zone, they couldn't stop our zone entries, they reacted slow after our hitting, and they made blind passes.
We needed a game like this. We needed not just to beat them, but to be the vastly superior team. Now this will motivate the Caps perhaps to play harder in game 4, but at the same time, it shows them that we can beat them. So far I've not been impressed with the Caps' WILL to win, aside from a few players (Holtby, Orpik, Backstrom, Jensen, maybe one or two others). We'll see what they are made of in game 4. Thank God there are 2 games off because our players must be dragging today. I hope no practice, just a full day off.
