Saturday, November 04, 2006

Lineup Shakeup

According to Mike Vogel, the Caps have shaken things up a bit in the wake of last night's loss to Atlanta. A quick recap of what's changed heading into tonight's game in Philadelphia against the desperate Flyers:
  • Richard Zednik is out with an upper body injury
  • Tomas Fleischmann has been called up and will skate with Jakub Klepis and Matt Pettinger.
  • The "Ben Clymer as a defenseman" experiment seems to be over, as he'll return to his familiar spot from last season on the left wing of the CBS line with Brian Sutherby and Matt Bradley.
  • Steve Eminger will be back in the lineup and paired with Bryan Muir. Yikes.
  • Kris Beech will sit. As a result, the Caps will get killed in the faceoff circle tonight.
  • Finally - and by far strangest of all - Alex Semin has been demoted to the fourth line, where he'll skate with Boyd Gordon and The Donald. Why is this so strange? Because Semin is first on the team in points-per-minute of ice time, second on the team in shots-per-minute and second in shooting percentage. So he gets less ice time? I assume that this is just to send a message to a slumping kid, but a scorer needs to play his way out of a slump, and sticking him on a line with a couple of slugs isn't the way to do it, in my opinion. We shall see.
Some suggest that these moves may be a sign of a trade coming soon. We shall see.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

1) We agree with your Semin opinion. Yes, he didn't have his finest game last night, but he wasn't alone.
2) Why place him with those 2 players? We can see him quickly begin to sulk if he stays there. Hopefully he'll still get some PP time as well
3) We like the ending of the Clymer experiment. Let Emminger play, as a young player won't improve from the press box