This is Joe Beninati.

You're listening to NBC Sports Washington's Capitals Face Off podcast.

Here he is.

Here's your host, J.J. Regan.

Thank you, Joe.

Welcome into another edition of NBC Sports Washington's Capitals Faceop podcast. I'm, of course, your host, the one and only, the Capitals correspondent, J.J. Regan, with me today. He's the Capitals Insider. He's the Barney Rebel to my Fred Flintstone. He's Tar Gelbuchar, Tark.ark. Barney had the nicer house and the better car and the hotter wife. I don't know. But anyway, you know what? I want to have a little intervention here, JJ. So I was in Brooklyn the other day for Caps Islanders, and I walk in the concourse. And this group of young men, they look like young bankers. They're all in Capitol's jerseys and capitals hats and stuff, but they were, you know, very well dressed. Hey, hey, there's Tark. There's Tark. So I came over and talked to him for a minute. They were like, hey, man, we love the podcast with JJ. But can you tell them those lame intros are so played out? He's got to come up with a new schick. Really? We all had a good laugh.

Because we get a lot of emails where people are telling us that they love the interest.

One group of young Wall Streeters did not like, did not like the intro. So I didn't tell you this

before because I wanted to save it right now. So this is our little intervention. If anyone had, all right, I am open the

suggestions for how I should open the show, but the only requirement is that it has to

insult Tarek in some way.

Anyway, moving on, what we will talk about today. We're going to talk about John Carlson's

season. We're going to talk about the Caps' new goalie rotation, and we will dive into the Brooks Orpick discussion just a little bit. Last week, it was Patrick Liney versus Alex Oveshkin. This week, it was John Carlson versus John Klingberg. Both players entered Tuesday's game, leading the NHL and points for defensemen and both elevated their game.

It was a fun duel to watch and both tally two points, though Carlson scored the game-winning goal.

So I'm going to go ahead and give the duel to him.

His teammates and coach were a few of them in their praise of Carlson after the game.

I think we look at John is definitely one of our leaders.

He plays a lot of big minutes, and he's very good on both sides of the puck.

So I think this year, with a couple of the young guys stepping in back there, I think he's

been looked to, or we've looked to him, to step up and lead and put on a good performance.

And, I mean, the numbers, the numbers don't lie.

He's been having an unreal season, definitely on the point side of things.

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