Islanders can't stop Capitals' relentless offense

There is no cool, new statistic that can revolutionize the game of hockey. There's no OPS or WHIP, like in baseball. So for Scott Gordon, the most insider-ish stat he consults is the very self-explanatory scoring chance.

You get more scoring chances than the opponent, you're probably going to win. You let them get more chances, and you get what the Islanders got last night.

The Capitals have a multitude of players who can create those chances. They have Alex Ovechkin, who took two of his 10 shots from the seat of his hockey pants. They have Alexander Semin, who needed very little room to score twice in the Caps' four-goal first period.

They have a lot, do the Eastern Conference-leading Capitals, so their 7-2 trouncing of the Islanders is not completely a shock, given that the Caps now have 202 goals in their 52 games. The Penguins have 172 goals, second-most in the East.

But Gordon said before the game that he'd taken the most pride in seeing his team go from a squad that regularly gave up 15-20 scoring chances a game last season, to one that whittled it down at times to a dozen this year, and into the single digits on some nights.

The Islanders gave up four scoring chances when they shut out the Red Wings 15 days ago. They gave up maybe one or two more in shutting out the Devils six days after that.

But last night, in the words of captain Doug Weight: "They made us look stupid." And that was without Ovechkin getting a point. Brooks Laich stepped through three Islanders as if they were frozen for a goal; Jason Chimera danced around Bruno Gervais for another.

"You can't give guys like they have time and space. They're going to make plays," said Frans Nielsen, who has a plus-13 rating, best on the team and some measure of his ability to limit scoring chances. "We did it with [Sidney] Crosby and [Evgeni] Malkin in Pittsburgh [in a 6-4 loss on Jan. 19], and that game wasn't nearly as bad as we were in this one."

Brendan Morrison, alone in front of Dwayne Roloson just 65 seconds in, tipped home a pass to put the Isles down. There was a two-on-one barely a minute later that Roloson stopped, but the dam had burst, already.

"It's certainly a reality check," said Gordon, who was more composed than he'd been on Saturday when the Devils scored four goals on seven or eight scoring chances. "They're just such a dynamic offensive team."

Perhaps last season, when the chances were plentiful and so were the wins against the Islanders, a game like this could be written off. There wasn't much to play for. But the Islanders have built a reputation as a tough team to play and generate chances against. They do not want to let that reputation, or their playoff hopes, slide. And the two go hand in hand.

"This can't happen," Nielsen said. "Not where we are in the standings, where the season is. We know what we have to do."