WASHINGTON -- Anyone who has watched a few seconds of a Washington power play can discern what poses the greatest threat.
And by a few seconds, it could be almost any few seconds over the past decade and a half.
It's Alex Ovechkin at the left circle. If he is left alone there, he will make teams pay. No team needs their team of professional scouts to tell them that in the pre-scout.
The Penguins still managed to do just that in Thursday's 3-2 shootout loss to the Capitals, and it played out exactly as one would expect.
When the Penguins were here last in November, I had a conversation with Ryan Poehling about defending against the Capitals' power play while at the morning skate. I asked him -- if everyone is so aware of the threat Ovechkin poses from that area, how is it that he's left alone there so frequently?
"Yeah, I know," Poehling said with a laugh at the time. "You give him just a little bit of time and space and think he's covered and he's not. I mean, he's one of the only guys in the league that can do that. It is a big test for us and we're looking forward to it."
The Penguins went on the penalty-kill early in the first period Thursday when P.O Joseph took a hooking penalty. Poehling, Bryan Rust, Marcus Pettersson and Chad Ruhwedel were on the ice late in the penalty-kill. Poehling was guarding Ovechkin when he saw Evgeny Kuznetsov carry the puck to the right circle. Poehling drifted over toward the net-front, leaving Ovechkin open for just a few split seconds.
That's all the time and space he needs to do this:
Poehling took responsibility when I spoke with him after the game.
"I didn't do my job," he said. "When you give the guy that much time and space, he ends up making you pay for it. That was a tough one. You just have to learn from it and move on. I just made the wrong read."
For what it's worth, the Penguins definitely learned from it. They went on the penalty-kill again later that period when Teddy Blueger got called for a faceoff violation, and Ovechkin was out there for almost the entire power play that ensued, barely moving from his post at the left faceoff dot. Either Poehling or Brock McGinn were all but glued to Ovechkin's side for the length of the kill.
"I think we stayed a little tighter to him," Poehling said. "That ended up doing the job for us."
Casey DeSmith, who called Ovechkin the "focal point of every penalty-kill," said that he thought the threat Ovechkin posed was neutralized in the penalty-kills as the game went on.
"You have to respect it, it's no secret what he does best," DeSmith said. "I thought on the first one maybe we gave him a little too much room, it was a nice pass, obviously, as well. I thought we locked it down the rest of the game."
