Alex Ovechkin broke his stick at the end of warm ups. When I heard and saw it, my first thought was of Slapshot falling at center ice just before the game against the Flyers in December, which happened to be the last game the Washington Capitals lost at Verizon Center. I hoped I was just doing the silly fan thing of drawing connections where they don’t exist (if not being more irrational), but that’s kind of the way the game went.

The Capitals played poorly and lost to the New York Islanders. It wasn’t like they were phoning it in (like some of the final games of the Bruce Boudreau era), but more like they just plain forgot how to play at the NHL level. Bad passes, a bit too much watching instead of doing, and when doing, everyone doing something different. Oh, well. It’s hard to get mad as a fan over this one.

The Russian Machine, Japer’s Rink and District Sports Page recaps are the regular good quality recaps that you expect form them, but On Frozen Blog focused on Karl Alzner in a good way and Ed Frankovic takes a look at the coach, Dale Hunter.  All good stuff.

My photos are below and on flickr.