The Washington Capitals don't just want to beat the Philadelphia Flyers- they want to step on their necks, slowly but surely squeezing the life out of Philly's NHL playoff hopes. Up three games to none in the blink of an eye, the Capitals have already almost done it.
But with game four of their first-round Eastern Conference series looming Wednesday night, you'd excuse the Caps if they let their foot slip off the gas a little. However, Capitals players weren't mooning for the camera and laughing about the ease with which they dispatched the Flyers through the first three games.
Instead, nearly to a man, the Capitals talked of finishing the job, choking that last little bit of life out of the orange and black.
"Obviously you want to kick a team when they're down, for sure," Jason Chimera said. "When their emotions get the best of them and they start taking penalties, you want to take advantage of that."
"I mean, they're always talking a lot, so it's always nice to shut their mouth with a couple goals," Andre Burakovsky added.
The way that game three ended - a melee of penalties amid an idiotic display by the notoriously passionate Philly fans - left a sour taste in a lot of mouths on both sides. The Flyers, frustrated by the Caps' effective power play - 47 percent conversion on the power play is unheard of and unsustainable, at least when Washington has to play a team other than the Flyers - and their oppressive defense, decided to up their physical play.
Only they struggled to keep that physical play within the NHL's guidelines and took penalty after penalty, which the Capitals, angered over hits on Brooks Orpik - though it was clean - and Dmitry Orlov, were more than happy to make use of, ultimately to the tune of four power play goals in the final stanza.
At this point, with the Flyers so far to the other end of the special teams spectrum - they've yet to score on any of their power plays in the series and have beaten Caps netminder Braden Holtby all of two times despite firing off 90-plus shots - and turning to Michal Neuvirth for some kind of game four spark, there seems little hope of Philly turning the series around.
Crazier things have happened, and it wasn't all that long ago that the Boston Bruins and the rest of the NHL were counting the Flyers out of a 3-0 playoff series. But when a team like the Caps - far and away the best in the league during the regular season and sitting pretty at 3-0 - are, instead of relieved, intent on choking the life out of their opponent, the chances of the Flyers picking themselves up off the ice and making a run aren't just slim- they're nearly nonexistent.
