Photo credit: Mitchell Layton

In his first game back since January 8th, Alex Semin led the Capitals with four shots on goal in 17:47 of ice time. After a 12 game layoff that stretched over 26 days, Sasha Minor looked rusty and missed on several golden opportunities. The Capitals fell to the Sharks 2-0, and endured their eighth shutout of the season.

After the game, SovSport’s Pavel Lysenkov caught up with Semin and asked him how he felt in his return, his thoughts on Bruce Boudreau’s trap, and what it’d mean to him to open next season in Russia. RMNB’s Igor Kleyner has your translation below the jump.

I GOT INJURED IN DECEMBER

Semin played on the second line with Brooks Laich and Mathieu Perreault. Alex was so upset by the loss, it took some persuading to get an interview. “We have waited for a month for your groin injury to heal!”

“It’s kind of hard at first,” admitted Semin. “But I played out the game without any pain.”

Pavel Lysenkov – Do you remember how you got injured?

Alex Semin – No. it happened a long time ago, in December.

PL – Did you play on with injections?

AS – Why would I? This is not the playoffs. I played through the pain. When I couldn’t tolerate it anymore, I went to the doctors.

PL – Evgeni Malkin just came back after his injury, and went down again. Did Washington push you to return to the ice?

AS – Not at all. I finished my treatment and returned to the lineup.

PL – The team is playing more defensive hockey now. Does this style fit you?

AS – The coach chooses the tactics. I haven’t changed my game. You simply have to execute your assignment. But you do what you want in around the opponents’ goal.

PL – Washington has tightened the neutral zone coverage…

AS – That is one of the coaches’ ideas.

PL – Was the game against the Sharks playoff-like?

AS – No. We just did not score. Their goalie had a good game. What kind of tactics is it if we end up losing 2-0? We need to do something differently. We relaxed in the third period, and the game got away…

PL – Is the team talking about the need to overtake Tampa?

AS – I have not heard anything like that. We need to win every game. And not think about who we’ll get in the playoffs. And what’s the difference anyway?

BETTER TIMES ARE COMING

PL – It appears Washington is simply lacking emotions this season.

AS – We used to win a lot of games. For whatever reason, it’s not happening this year. We need to find ourselves and play like we can.

PL – You beat Tampa 5-2 a few days ago…

AS – That’s what I am talking about. Or the game against Pittsburgh: 3-0.

PL – Are you sick of the press-box? You sat up there while injured.

AS – Oh, totally. I even wanted to stop coming to the games. I was fed up with watching hockey from the sidelines. I wanted to go on the ice. But you can’t rush.

PL – Earlier this season, when everything was going wrong for him, Kovalchuk said, “Maybe someone put a spell on me.” Are you superstitious?

AS – To each his own. Yes, I do believe in such things. But I don’t know why anybody would put a curse on me. Who would want to do that?

PL – It seems the whole Russian Olympic team has been cursed.

AS – Things happen. We are all going through a dark period. But it will get better. You can’t get hung up on that.

PL – Do the words of the NHL commissioner Gary Bettman bother you? He doesn’t want to send his teams to Siberia.

AS – But he has never been there. It’s a longer flight from here to Los Angeles than from Moscow to Novosibirsk. It’s only four hours to my hometown Krasnoyarsk…

PL – Would you like to go there with Washington?

AS – From what I have read, we are opening our regular season in Peter [Saint Petersburg] against Buffalo. But I did not hear anything about playing against the KHL teams. We’ll play if we need to. And we will not be taking it easy. If you relax, it’s easy to get seriously injured.

PL – Ovechkin said: if the Capitals get to play at Khodynka, a half of Krasnoyarsk will gather there.

AS – There will be a lot of people supporting me. Although nobody has asked for a ticket yet. It’s still too early.

Additional reporting by Ian Oland.

Photo credit: Scott Cunningham

After the Capitals’ humiliating 7-0 loss to the Rangers in December, head coach Bruce Boudreau changed his defensive scheme to include the neutral-zone trap. I won’t go into the how and why this system works, but it essentially looks to keep small mistakes from turning into major breakdowns that lead to goals against.

Over the years, the trap has often been associated with teams that have a “defense first” mentality – you know, boring squads. That’s a far cry from last season’s ”run ‘n’ gun” Caps team that lead the League in scoring by almost 50 goals while being merely average at keeping the puck out their own net. Most notably, it satisfies critics who feel the system employed by Boudreau over the past few seasons is incapable of winning in the playoffs. But is it?

Here’s what I did:

1. I logged a team’s won-loss record in both the regular season and playoffs for every year since the lockout (2005-2010), for each day of the season.
2. Teams were labeled as being an “offensive” or “defensive” team based upon their goals for/against relative to the average goals for/against for that season. If a team was higher above the league average in goals-for than goals-against, I labeled them as an offensive team. If their goals-against was better than the league average than goals-for, I labeled them a defensive team.
3. Then, I looked for matched pairs of teams where one team was an offensive team and one team was a defensive team and the game was not decided in a shootout.

2,488 games have been played since the lockout where teams with differing styles met during the regular season. Those teams labeled as “defensive,” such as the 2006-10 New Jersey Devils or the 2006-07 Dallas Stars, won 1,304 of them — good for a .524 win percentage — while offensive juggernauts like the 2009-10 Capitals or 2008-09 Red Wings had a win percentage of just .476, showing that a defensive style of play has a clear advantage during the regular season when matched up against offensive powerhouses.

The playoffs, however, are a different story. Out of the 426 playoffs games since the lockout, opposite style teams matched up in 165 of them, with the defensive minded teams winning only 42.4% of the time, almost a fifth less than they did in the regular season.