The flailing Washington Capitals travel to Toronto tonight, 7pm ET to face the Maple Leafs at the Air Canada Center. The game will be shown on CBC on Hockey Night in Canada.

Both teams played last night, and both were victorious. The Capitals beat an excellent Lightning team, while the Leafs took down an exciting and talented Hurricanes team.

The Leafs lines, from DailyFaceoff.com are rotating in Roman Polak, Dominic Moore and Matt Martin to get fresh legs on the back-to-back:

For the Capitals, here is the lineup they ran last night:

One would expect that the goaltenders starting tonight are Philip Grubauer and Curtis McElhinney.

By the numbers, the Leafs have been a middle of the pack team. When factoring for home/away advantage and score state, the Leafs posting just a 50.39 CF%. (shot attempts for vs. shot attempts against) and a 51.00 xGF% (similar to CF% but each attempt is weighted for shot location). Thankfully for tonight’s game, the Capitals have been worse, with a 47.73 CF% and a 48.55 xGF%.

The Leafs have been pretty good lately, especially Frederik Andersen. The team has been letting their game quality slip, as they seem to be getting away from controlling the game and moving more towards capitalizing on what opportunities show themselves.

The Capitals are similar, having taken a huge drop in team quality from last season that I can’t quite understand. The team is largely the same, so one might expect them to turn it around as the season goes on, but the predictive numbers above would definitely suggest otherwise.

The interesting choice to rotate Moore, Polak and Martin in isn’t a ludicrous one. There’s no doubt that I would consider those 3 worse players than those they are replacing (Soshnikov, Leivo and Carrick), but so too is your backup goalie worse than your starting goalie. This Eric Tulsky piece for Broad Street Hockey shows that playing the backup is the favourable decision on the second half of a back-to-back, despite knowing that they’re a worse goaltender. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Leafs have a sports science team suggesting that the fresh legs are a better choice than the somewhat better players who are coming off of no rest.

It’ll be an interesting game, as the Leafs try to continue to chase the Lightning for tops in the Atlantic, and the Capitals push to keep themselves into the top 3 spots in the Metropolitan division.

Make the Pint your home for all things game day. We give away a free pound of wings during every game either home or away. $4.40 mugs of Bud and Bud Lights.