Capitals goalie Braden Holtby gave up this goal in Game 2, even as his team was outshooting the Penguins by a lot. Washington’s best chance to rally in the series is to stick with Holtby, hope its relentless offense eventually pays off, and to not panic, Dan Steinberg writes. (Rob Carr/Getty Images)

The hockey description of playoff panic involves the grip on a hockey stick, and it’s a wonderful metaphor. Players paralyzed by postseason pressure are said to be gripping their sticks too tightly. Those who thrive inside that absurd vice of tension, on the other hand, are said to have a gentle, caressing touch. They hold their sticks like, I don’t know, like delicate wheels of Humboldt Fog, playing freely and joyfully without denting the cheese.

“The majority of guys in the league squeeze it in the playoffs; you know, they get a little bit too tense,” Washington Capitals defenseman Karl Alzner once told me. “They still play good, but you don’t make those really nice plays, plays that are maybe unexpected.”

The Caps came out in Game 2 of their second-round playoff series against the Pittsburgh Penguins on Saturday night looking plenty nice, with one of their best periods of the playoffs. They earned, as a reward, zero goals and several thousand prophesies of doom. Then, as a group, they tightened their grip.

Newcomer Kevin Shattenkirk was visited by the Ghosts of Capital Past, from his failure to stop a shorthanded breakaway to his ghastly delay-of-game penalty. Goalie Braden Holtby looked paralyzed and uncomfortable, failing to give his team any sort of lift before he was pulled. And the coach, Barry Trotz, seemed to clench up himself, offering Holtby as a sop to the angry crowd.

Andre Burakovsky, right, and the Capitals peppered goalie Marc-Andre Fleury in Game 2, but Pittsburgh took advtange of its opportunities and did all the celebrating. (Rob Carr/Getty Images)

“I was just trying to change the mojo,” Trotz later explained. Fans suggested the move might light a fire under Holtby’s teammates, as if the Caps had forgotten this game was important before their franchise goalie put on a ballcap. You can’t just try nothing, Trotz said, “and so we tried.”

[Barry Svrluga: It’s starting to look like the same old story for the Capitals]

Here’s a word of disagreement, both with that move and with what it hints at. In fact, here’s a piece of advice borrowed from another one of Washington’s recent postseason tormenters: R.E.L.A.X. (And some bonus advice for the fans: X.A.N.A.X.)

You would have to live somewhere between optimism and insanity to predict the Caps will win this series. NHL teams that drop the first two games of a seven-game set at home go on to lose about 80 percent of the time. The Caps have lost six straight games in Pittsburgh. They have lost eight of nine playoff series against the Penguins. We might as well rename the Potomac the Monongahela, put french fries inside our empanadas and be done with it.

Still, Washington’s only chance, it seems to me, is to ease back into the team it’s been for the past two years. Don’t try to reinvent yourself in May. Don’t worry about flipping your lines. Don’t bother scratching 15-goal scorer Brett Connolly in favor of Paul Carey, who recorded zero NHL points this season. And there is really no need to bench a two-time Vezina Trophy finalist, who boasts some of the best postseason goaltending statistics in the history of the league, even if you’re not thrilled with his play.

I argued this point with dozens of Caps fans online Sunday morning, and they mostly disagreed with me, applauding Trotz for yanking Holtby in the middle of his second straight disappointing outing. It’s a standard NHL move, one that wasn’t particularly surprising — or effective.

I would just counter that these Capitals have a tortured, agonizing, abusive playoff history. The organization is shrouded by a nasty mist that shimmers with impending doom. This team needs calm faith right now, not a leadership ready to fling its controller into the wall and rage-quit the game.

After withstanding Washington’s siege, the Penguins scored on two odd-man rushes and one moment of Sidney Crosby brilliance. There is an understandable temptation when things go sideways like that to make a dramatic change. To retreat from who you are, out of a fear that it just isn’t good enough. To run around smashing alarms and flipping emergency switches. To squeeze your hockey stick into a fine composite powder.

This series is a chance to ignore those temptations. You have to believe that you are good enough, that your best game is better than anything Pittsburgh has to offer, that having the league’s top record two years in a row wasn’t a fluke or an accident but a result of superior talent and unmatched consistency. You have to trust that if you demonstrate that on the ice — if you utterly dominate a period the way the Caps did Saturday night, with 35 shot attempts to Pittsburgh’s eight — you’ll be rewarded in the end.

I know, I know. Maybe that isn’t true. Maybe the Caps could dominate every first period against the Penguins from now until the rapture and it will never work out. Maybe there is some fundamental flaw with this team, a blemish invisible in January but oozing with pus every April. Maybe they’re not good enough. But for however many games this series lasts, they have to believe the opposite.

“I think we got a little frustrated after the first period,” defenseman Brooks Orpik said. “It felt like we outplayed them, and I think we maybe got a little frustrated because we didn’t have anything to show for it. We kind of deviated from our plan a little bit.”

Orpik was talking tactics, not the goalie change, but the same idea applies. The team’s staff got spooked by the scoreboard, and so it put one of its strongest chances for a long playoff run on the bench. The mojo didn’t change, and neither did the outcome.

The Holtby incident is only one small data point, but it could point to a larger problem: overreacting to adversity, thereby ratcheting up the tension even more. Trotz wouldn’t even commit to Holtby — a player he described as the backbone of his team — on Saturday night, before telling reporters on Sunday that of course Holtby will be in net on Monday night for Game 3.

If there were grand expectations for this team, they’re mostly gone now. The biggest hope seems to be that the Caps don’t find a way to lose this series in three games. For the first time in a year, they have been reduced to hopeful underdogs.

So savor that much, at least. No more rage-quitting. No more dramatic moves made in search of “mojo,” unless Marcus Johansson finds himself trapped in a bathroom stall. No more confining one of your best players to the bench. And at this point, you might as well ease up that grip. Save it for the handshake line.

(The victory handshake line, duh. Don’t be so cynical.)

For more by Dan Steinberg, visit washingtonpost.com/dcsportsbog.