Tyler Bertuzzi scored a pair of opportunistic goals, and the first of the two held up as the game-winner on Thursday night at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena as the Leafs finished a sweep of the season’s series with Washington, winning 5-1.
Thursday’s loss halted Washington’s three-game winning streak, but the Caps were able to hold their position as the occupant of the Eastern Conference’s second wild card slot because Detroit came up empty in a 4-0 loss to Carolina. The Caps didn’t lose any ground on Philadelphia, either; the Flyers fell 4-1 to the Habs in Montreal.
Toronto coach Sheldon Keefe challenged his club in the wake of a flat performance against the Devils here on Tuesday in a 6-3 New Jersey win, a loss that left the Leafs with their first set of consecutive regulation losses since mid-January. Toronto responded by playing a firm, strong game, and by applying near constant pressure on the Capitals.
“From the start of the game, you could feel that our group was overwhelmed early on, just with the speed of the game, the way things were happening,” says Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery. “You could see a bunch of puck touches where we bobble it, we’re fighting it early, and it was just too quick for us tonight.”
Toronto took a 1-0 lead just after the midpoint of the first period, and soon after it failed to score on its first power play opportunity of the evening. Playing in his first game since Feb. 29, veteran defenseman Mark Giordano took a feed from Matthew Knies high in the Washington zone, and he fired a wrist shot high to the top right corner of the cage at 10:09.
The Leafs pelted Caps’ goalie Charlie Lindgren with 19 shots in the first frame – and 48 of them on the night. He made a couple of impressive stops on tips and shots with traffic in front. Lindgren’s most difficult early stop might have been an Auston Matthews drive from the slot in the first period; the Leafs’ sniper tried to go high blocker, and Lindgren was able to flap the puck aside with his blocker up around his left ear.
A mere 18 seconds into the middle period, the Leafs doubled their lead on a Bertuzzi goal from below the goal line. Bertuzzi banked it off Lindgren and in to make it 2-0. Bertuzzi’s first tally continued a troubling trend in which Washington has yielded seven goals against in the first or last minute of a period in its last four games; three in the first minute and four in the last.
“We talk about it all the time,” says Caps’ defenseman John Carlson. “After goals starting and ending periods, they’re big momentum swings in the game that – as it gets close here down the stretch – we talk about and need to do a lot better.
“When we’re at our best, we’re stymieing other teams and controlling those parts of games. I think we do a good job with that, and it’s fallen a little bit.”
Washington responded just over five minutes later, cutting into the Leafs’ lead when Nic Dowd expertly tipped a Nick Jensen right point drive through the five-hole of Toronto netminder Joseph Woll at 5:27.
Lindgren kept it right there with a huge breakaway stop on William Nylander on the very next shift, and seconds after that big stop, Washington went on its second power play of the game with a chance to pull even. As it would turn out, this was the Caps’ last and best opportunity to make it a new game, and they weren’t able to pull it off. Their power play has been a valuable weapon for a couple of months now, but on this night, it lacked luster.
“We had known that they were going to pressure hard on their penalty kill,” says Caps’ right wing T.J. Oshie. “And we were prepared for it; we just didn’t execute there. There were certain plays that were there, that didn’t get made. That’s something that we’ll look at; it definitely could have been a turning point in the game.
“We were doing okay in the offensive zone at that point at 5-on-5. [Dowd’s goal was] a huge goal, and a power-play goal there, the game would have looked a lot different, at least from that moment on.”
Carbery saw it as more of a carryover from the Caps’ woes at 5-on-5.
“Just chalk it up to the same thing,” says Carbery. “If you’re hoping for something like a power play to all of a sudden click, if your 5-on-5 is really struggling with the pace of the game and how quick pressure is coming on you, okay, so let’s just put that 5-on-4; it’s the same thing. We’re getting surprised by pressure, guys caught off guard, guys bobbling pucks – ‘Oh my gosh, this guy is on me quickly,’ and you saw it on the power plays as well.”
Just after the midpoint of the middle period, the Leafs restored their two-goal cushion with a fourth-line tally; Connor Dewar got a favorable bounce in front and put a backhander home for his first goal in a Toronto sweater at 11:38.
With the Caps pressing for offense early in the third, they gave up a 2-on-1 rush, and Toronto captain John Tavares fed Bobby McMann for the finish just 66 seconds into the third. While it wasn’t one of those first- or last-minute tallies mentioned earlier, it had a deflating effect, and the Caps rarely threatened offensively thereafter.
Bertuzzi pounced on a misplay behind the Washington net in the back half of the third to tack on the fifth Toronto tally, accounting for the 5-1 final.
Toronto outscored Washington by a combined total of 16-5 in the sweep of the three-game season’s series between the two teams, and the Caps never held a lead at any point in the 180 minutes of hockey they played against the Maple Leafs in 2023-24.
“Give them credit,” says Carbery of the Leafs. “They are where they are for a reason, and they’ve got a really good hockey team. It’s a really tough match-up for us because they’re so fast. We struggle with really good skating teams that can put you on your heels. It’s just not a strength of our team.”
