Not long after the Washington Capitals returned to the visitors’ dressing room at Madison Square Garden on Saturday, they began to remove their sweaters, lick their wounds and turn their focus forward.
What they had endured in losing to the New York Rangers — a substandard performance pockmarked with occasional flashes of success — would be ill-served to stand on its own. The postseason is comprised of several series, often long ones, and the team knew that one game would be best evaluated within the frame of its greater goals.
That message has consistently been delivered by coach Barry Trotz, who has shown his players the proper way to contextualize every outcome, no matter how trivial, over the course of a playoff series.
Thus, when the Capitals returned to practice on Sunday morning, they did so understanding that there’s a plan that they must follow: Break it down, objectively understand why it happened and isolate ways to correct it.
“I think, obviously, it’s not the worst thing to happen,” said goaltender Braden Holtby, trivializing the loss. “It’s a split. I think we learned about what our game has to be, what it can be, out of those two games, so it was good. There was a lot of positive things — and a lot of negative things, and a lot of things we know we need to work on to really be successful.”
Heading into Saturday, Trotz used the experience he had gained while guiding seven previous playoff teams to remind his players what they were likely to encounter that afternoon. The Rangers, he insisted, would play with a high degree of desperation, urgency culled from the desire not to open in a two-game hole and hit the road with a mountain of a task to climb.
They did just that, scoring 38 seconds into the game and dictating the pace for nearly the entire first period en route to a series-tying victory. Rather than turning around and castigating his team for not heeding his advice, he did just what he has reminded his players to do on a number of previous occasions — park it, as he likes to say, keeping the memory and the lessons in the right place in one’s mind.
“Obviously, it was good to get that first win, but we felt as a group we, you know, kind of let one get away from us in Game 2,” center Jay Beagle said. “We had a chance to come out hard, and we knew after Game 1 they were going to come out and give us their best, and you know, they did. They came out hard and played a good first period. We knew it was going to be a battle in Game 2, but it’s behind us now, and we’re looking forward to Game 3.”
Before the Capitals opened the first round against the New York Islanders, and occasionally as it progressed, Trotz would offer a reminder that the series had the makings of one that would go all seven games.
Subtly, that statement expressed a confidence in the Capitals’ ability to adapt. Trotz, in essence, reassured his players that collectively, they had time to work out of whatever issues may plague them — and they did, responding to every loss in that series with a victory.
The reiteration of that broad approach returned on Sunday, when salient points from the day before were met with a broad response. The Rangers had better scoring chances, but only because they capitalized off Washington’s mistakes. They controlled the puck, yet that was the result of the Capitals’ weaker forecheck. That second-period power-play goal was the result of lapses within the previously invincible penalty kill.
“Maybe it was pressing,” right wing Jason Chimera said after the game. “Maybe they got a few more looks than we’d liked. We’re trying to press on some goals, but … you’ve got to shore up the middle of the ice there. They have good guys who can find some holes, and their [defensemen] are going to move around in the offensive zone. We’ve got to play a more structured game, and we’ll be fine.”
Unanimous trust in Trotz’s system has given the team confidence that should it impose its will on the Rangers and be aggressive, the outcome will be fortunate. How long it takes, then, is less important than what it takes.
The blueprint, the coach has reminded his players, is there. Success will only result if they don’t deviate too far from it.
“We need to reset a little bit after the first two games,” Trotz said. “I think we have to have a real good positive plan going forward, and so I think, you know, the guys have always been good at buying in at what we need to do. We’ve just got to execute what we’re trying to do.”
• Zac Boyer can be reached at zboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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