Monday, October 24, 2011

Sittin' at the end of the bar...

It’s a little known fact…

-- That Dennis Wideman is the only player in the league who has a point in each of his team’s games so far this season. The seven-game streak surpasses the longest streak any Caps defenseman had last year. Mike Green had a six-game streak from October 28th through November 9th (4-6-10).

-- Alex Ovechkin had a two-goal game last Thursday. Once upon time, that was pretty common. But this one broke a 16-game streak (25, including playoff games) dating back to last March 9th against Edmonton. It was only his third in 74 regular season games since last October 30th.

-- John Carlson had a streak of three games from February 25th through March 1st last season in which he finished on the minus side of the ledger, the longest streak of his young career. In the 25 regular season games since he has a total of four such games (none so far this season) and is a plus-14.

-- Mathieu Perreault played his last seven games with the Caps last season to a 1-1-2, minus-7 result. His first five games this year are 3-2-5, plus-6. Whatever he did over the summer…it worked so far.

-- Maybe no one except Kanoobie has noticed, but Mike Knuble has points in four of his last five games (1-4-5, plus-3). In his last 21 regular season games he is 10-8-18, plus-9.

-- Jason Chimera scored his fourth goal of the season in the season’s fifth game. Last year he didn’t get his fourth goal of the season until November 20th, in Game 21.

-- Matt Hendricks is plus-5 for the season and has a pair of plus-2’s in his last two games. Hendricks did not have as many as two games better than plus-1 in either of his two full seasons before this one and in fact had only one game better than a plus-1 in his career over 142 games before finishing plus-2 in his last two games (plus-3 in a 6-4 win over Atlanta last November 14th).

-- Alex Ovechkin has gone five consecutive games playing fewer than 20 minutes. It is the first time he has gone five consecutive games under 20 minutes since his first five games in the NHL.

-- Nicklas Backstrom got to ten points in his seventh game of the season. The only other time in his career he got to ten points in fewer than ten games he had his only 100-point season (2009-2010, ten points in his first four games on his way to 101 points).

-- Alexander Semin is 5-7-12, plus-6 in his last dozen regular season games dating back to last March 26th.