Ray Emery is sitting out as backup for Wednesday’s game between the Flyers and Capitals in Washington, ceding way to Rob Zepp, a guy with exactly two games of NHL experience. This probably doesn’t bode well for Emery, right?
Let’s not read into it too much. Starting Zepp against Washington makes sense for a few reasons.
Razor Ray is awful vs. Washington
Emery doesn’t historically play well against the Capitals. That doesn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things, even though coaches probably read into it way too much, but Emery’s numbers against the Caps are particularly bad: In 13 games, he’s 4-8-0 with 44 goals against and an .878 save percentage. He also has 29 penalty minutes against the Capitals, because lol.
Why change what worked on Monday?
Secondly, Zepp played really well the other night against Tampa Bay — or, maybe we should say that the team played great in front of him. Frankly, regardless of what’s going on around him, Zepp deserves to play another game here and against a Washington team that’s the hottest in the league of late, it doesn’t make a ton of sense to change things up.
Emery will play tomorrow, anyway
Thirdly, Wednesday night is the first game of a back-to-back, and although it happens more than we’d like, it’s really never smart to start the same goaltender on consecutive nights. The results aren’t good when teams try it. Zepp and Emery are almost certainly going to split these two games, so the order in which they do so doesn’t really matter at all. Ray will get his chance in the nets on Thursday night at home vs. Vancouver.
