Philip Tomasino’s breakaway goal midway through the second period snapped a 1-1 tie and proved to be the game-winner as the Predators earned a 3-1 victory over the Capitals on Saturday night at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena. With Saturday’s triumph, the red-hot Preds are now 13-3-0 in their last 16 contests.
The Preds were an opportunistic bunch, cashing in on their opportunities while the Caps struggled to get started at the outset, and then weren’t able to generate enough good looks during a dominant stretch that encompassed much of the second period.
“The second period was obviously our best; a lot of good sequences,” says Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery. “We sort of take over the game there, and then we give that third one up [early in the third], and it really put us in a tough spot, and then it started to get a little bit sloppier. We didn’t have as much connected [offensive] zone time, looked a little bit disordered, trying to do things on our own, and just trying to save the game when we’re down two, so the process sort of got away from us.”
The Caps fell down by a goal early when a couple of miscues resulted in a Preds’ power play, and ultimately, the game’s first goal. Washington wasn’t able to engineer a clean exit from its end, taking an icing call instead. Seconds later, Caps’ defenseman Trevor van Riemsdyk put the puck just over the glass for a delay of game penalty. On the ensuing man advantage, Nashville’s Colton Sissons made a nifty deflection of a Roman Josi center point drive at 5:07.
Washington didn’t have much going on offensively in the first; it was limited to just four shots on goal in the opening period, and two of those were off the sticks of defensemen from over 150 feet away. The Caps needed a pair of big stops from Charlie Lindgren midway through the first – one on Luke Evangelista and the other on Cole Smith – to keep the deficit at one heading into the second.
The Caps came out with more verve and purpose in the middle frame, and they found themselves with a 5-on-3 power play of 76 seconds in duration before the five-minute mark. Seconds before the first penalty was to expire, the Caps pulled even with their first 5-on-3 marker of the season, a T.J. Oshie tally. Oshie swept Dylan Strome’s tip-in try over the goal line to square the score at 1-1 at 5:16 of the second.
With the game evened up and the Preds playing for the second time in as many nights, the next goal loomed large, and Washington wasn’t able to manufacture it, despite its dominance in terms of possession and time in the offensive zone.
“I felt all night like guys were fighting the puck, and from our back end especially, fighting the puck,” says Carbery. “So they have a tough night back there, and then even offensively, a lot of the situations you see that we get into, there’s just not quite that last couple of plays to finish, or to get a puck to the middle of the rink, or to find an option backside, or tuck one under the bar. Just a lot of guys fighting the puck tonight.”
Nashville netminder Juuse Saros had to make one of his best stops of the night just after the midpoint of the middle period, moving laterally to deny Caps’ captain Alex Ovechkin following a sublime feed from Strome, one of Washington’s best 5-on-5 opportunities of the evening.
The Caps continued to dominate in the offensive zone for the next minute or so, but the Saros save on Ovechkin proved to be large when Smith poked a puck to space in the neutral zone, springing Tomasino on a breakaway, right in the midst of an extended offensive zone shift for the Caps. Tomasino beat Lindgren to make it a 2-1 game at 13:26 of the second.
Washington went shorthanded early in the third when Ovechkin was whistled for a slash on Nashville’s Filip Forsberg. The Caps killed the penalty off without incident, only to have the Preds’ Yakov Trenin score on a bouncing puck in front five seconds later, accounting for the 3-1 final.
The Caps had a late power play that became a stretch of 6-on-4 hockey with Lindgren pulled for the extra attacker, but they weren’t able to make a dent in that two-goal deficit, ending their point streak at four (2-0-2).
Ultimately, the Caps didn’t get to the top of their game for enough of the 60 minutes on Saturday night, and they didn’t maximize their best period of the night, coming out even in that stanza and down a puck in the first and third frames.
“Yeah, you look at their goals,” says Lindgren. “First one, nice tip. Second one, breakaway. Third one, just kind of a bouncing puck right on top of the crease there. As we all know, it’s a game of bounces. And tonight, they came out on top.”
