Carolina has won six straight games entering Wednesday, sits at 6-1-1 and leads the league by record. That's a real team playing real hockey this early in the season. Mark Jankowski has scored in five straight games. Andrei Svechnikov keeps turning power plays into highlight reels. It's a team playing with the kind of depth that makes opposing coaches sick to their stomach in October, let alone April.
Tuesday was about how little Washington did to make Carolina prove it.
Svechnikov scored twice and added an assist. The dagger, a power-play backhander that beat Logan Thompson six seconds into a man advantage, happened because Justin Sourdif went to the box for tripping. That's a team conceding a free possession in a one-score game against the hottest club in hockey. Jankowski's empty-netter that sealed it was just cleanup. The game was lost well before that, in the stretch where Carolina started pulling away and Washington had no answer for it.
This should sting in Washington: Carolina lost a forward to injury during the game. A team six games into a win streak, playing shorthanded by the end of the night, still had enough to put four goals on a Capitals club that got goals from Boone Jenner and Justin Holl and two helpers from Ryan Leonard. Calling that "the Capitals ran out of legs against a tired, undermanned opponent" indicts them. A full-strength Washington team shouldn't be hanging on by its fingernails against a Carolina squad that's down a body. Carolina finding enough to pull away says which team wanted it more over sixty minutes.
Svechnikov also took an unsportsmanlike conduct penalty from the bench in the first period, handing Washington a brief two-man advantage, and Washington still couldn't turn it into real separation. A team had a puncher's chance early and let it slip, then got outworked the rest of the night by a club that was clearly better even while missing a piece.
Washington's record sits at 3-3-0, nothing to panic over this early, and Logan Thompson kept it from being a blowout with 31 saves. There's effort in that box score if you squint for it. But effort that evaporates for stretches against a short-handed team is a warning sign. Pretending otherwise because Carolina's the best story in the league right now just lets Washington off a hook it put itself on.
Carolina is for real. Washington should be embarrassed anyway.
