Three power play goals by the Pittsburgh Penguins are the difference as the

Caps lose their first of four games with their bitter rivals on rivalry night,

3-2.

It's the final score as we welcome you in to this edition

of our capitals face-off podcast for Thursday morning October 12th I'm Rob Carlin that's

Alan May and also joining us tonight our show producer Ryan Billy as the caps three to two, and they went into this game.

Their PK unit was outstanding.

It had given up one power play goal, and that was an overtime four-on-three power play.

And then they just, Alan, too many penalties and then gave up a lot of dirty, ugly power play goals to a really good,

effective, dirty, ugly team.

Yeah, well, you look at last season, the Caps had a penalty problem very early in the season.

I actually seemed like it carried on a long time, and it's something that's affecting them

right now.

And I think this year, last year was kind of lazy.

This year, I think it's because

their other teams are playing them faster because of the defensive units that they're putting

out there right now. And then tonight, Pittsburgh Penguins figured out a way to get pucks to the net

and battle harder for their rebounds to score those three power play goals. So it's a bad

combination right now. Too many penalties and then having a team figure out what your weakness may be in the penalty killing area. And right now it's throwing pucks at the front of the net. So the caps have done a very good job through the first three games. It's a small sample size, but they were keeping teams to the perimeter, chasing pucks, not letting pucks get through to the front of the net. And Pittsburgh tonight found a way just to get quick pox to the net and then crash, crash, crash.

We're going to talk about the great debut for Christian Juice,

who becomes just the third Caps defenseman to ever score a goal in his NHL debut.

Start thinking now who those other two are.

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