Caps, 3 Tampa Bay 0
Productive second period for Washington. Alex Ovechkin scored twice – Nos. 19 and 20 – and Eric Fehr notched No. 8. Caps already have four players with 10 goals or more and three others with at least eight – Fehr, Brendan Morrison (9) and Nicklas Backstrom (8). Ovechkin’s second goal was bizarre. Tampa goalie Mike Smith made a great skate save, but the puck trickled to the other side of the crease and Ovechkin just tapped it hard enough to push it across the goal line.
Despite missing eight games, Ovechkin has reached 20 goals already. Even in his 65-goal campaign in 2007-08 he took 27 games to reach that mark. Fehr has the second-longest current point streak in the NHL with at least one in each of the last seven games. Caps lead in shots, 23-21. Goalie Semyon Varlamov has made three or four nice glove saves and isn’t giving up many rebounds at all. Tomas Fleischmann and Alex Semin each have a pair of assists. We’ll see if Tampa Bay has any push early in the third to get back into this one.
