Caps Fall to Florida in OT, 5-4

Over the years, the Capitals and the Florida Panthers have engaged in some wild contests here in South Florida. When the two teams met here on Thursday night for the first time in nearly two years, they hooked up in another strange and entertaining contest, one that ended with the same score as their previous meeting here on a Thursday night nearly two years ago, but this time with the home team prevailing.

Eetu Luostarinen ended the night at 1:55 of overtime, scoring on a favorable bounce to give Florida a 5-4 overtime victory. Luostarinen was trying to hit Frank Vatrano at the back post on a timing play, and the puck instead hit Tom Wilson's stick and went past Caps goalie Vitek Vanecek, who started and finished for the Caps but didn't play the entire game.
"That's a tough one," laments Wilson. "Obviously [Florida center Sasha] Barkov is a pretty good defensive player. He kind of stripped me, and then I just couldn't get off the ice. They did a good job at taking it back, and I was kind of the post up guy, and just the slightest little change and they can get an odd man rush, and then obviously just kind of a bad bounce off my stick."
For the Capitals, Thursday night's game against the Panthers got off to an odd start, to say the least.

The Caps announced Ilya Samsonov as their starting netminder a couple of hours before the game, but when the puck dropped shortly after 7 p.m., Vanecek was in the Washington crease and Samsonov was nowhere to be seen. Before the game was two minutes old, Samsonov appeared on the bench, and he came on to "relieve" Vanecek at the next stoppage, at 1:45 of the first.
"We're probably just better off saying he had an issue; he needed a minute," says Caps coach Peter Laviolette, of Samsonov.
Just 77 seconds later, the Panthers were on the board.
The Caps had possession behind the net in their end but weren't able to clear, and Carter Verhaeghe collected the puck in the left circle. He fed Barkov in the slot, and after Samsonov made his first save of the night on the initial shot, Anthony Duclair nudged the puck back to Barkov for a second try. This time, Barkov's backhander beat Samsonov to make it a 1-0 game at 3:07.
Washington unsuccessfully challenged the goal - alleging goaltender interference on Duclair - but the goal was upheld, and the Caps had to kill the ensuing delay of game penalty to keep the score at 1-0.
Shortly after the midpoint of the first, the Panthers did double their lead. Duclair blunted John Carlson's breakout bid and fed Verhaeghe for a good look from in tight. Samsonov stopped that one, but Aaron Ekblad intercepted the Caps' clearing bid and put it home from the right point for a 2-0 Panthers lead at 11:04.
At the start of the second, the Panthers made a goaltending change of their own. Bobrovsky left with an upper body injury after stopping all 13 Washington shots in the first, yielding to rookie Spencer Knight.
The Caps wasted little time in baptizing Knight. Anthony Mantha fired a tape-to-tape stretch pass to send Daniel Sprong in on a breakaway, and the Washington winger beat Knight on the first shot he faced, making it a 2-1 game just 43 seconds into the second.

Mantha took two more shifts before leaving the game with an upper body injury.
Just ahead of the midpoint of the middle period, there was yet another goaltending change. When Florida's Brandon Montour beat Samsonov with a wrist shot from the right point at 7:16, Samsonov's night came to an end, and Vanecek went back between the pipes.
"That was me, just making a call and not liking the way the game went," says Laviolette of the reinstallation of Vanecek. "There were just things I thought we could have done better, things that he could have done better, and definitely things we could have done better. And so I made the change."
Washington ran into some penalty trouble in the middle of the period, and the Caps got a break when a Barkov goal was waved off at the end of the first penalty; officials judged that Florida forward Patric Hornqvist had interfered with Vanecek.
But the Cats soon got another kick at the power play can, and this time Barkov made good, finding and burying a rebound to open up a 4-1 lead for the home team at 15:32 of the second.
The Caps weren't about to pack up and head home, and they got life when Alex Ovechkin took a feed from Lars Eller, cruised down the left side and beat Knight to make it a 4-2 game at 18:11. Knight became the 150th different goaltender Ovechkin has scored against in his illustrious 17-year career.
"Great job by Lar," says Ovechkin, of career goal No. 740. "He was waiting for me a little bit, and when he dropped me the puck, so I had lots of time to see what's happening. I'll take it."

Washington wasn't done, either. With 16.8 seconds left in the second, Wilson notched his first goal of the season, tipping home a Carlson point shot to make it a 4-3 game heading into the second intermission.
Down to 11 forwards and deploying some new and different line combinations, the Caps pulled even early in the third when Connor McMichael joined Brett Leason as the second Washington forward to score his first NHL goal on the trip.
Ovechkin was behind the Florida net with the puck, trying to get it to the front. It popped up and landed in the slot, and McMichael found it first and banged it in before anyone else could react, tying the game at 4-4 at 6:56 of the third.

Both sides had chances thereafter, but both goaltenders kept the red lights off and the two sides went to overtime in a 4-4 game, just as they had done the last time they met here on Nov. 7, 2019.
That night, the Caps came back from a 3-1 deficit and forced overtime on the strength of a pair of Ovechkin goals. The Caps tied that game on Wilson's goal in the first minute of the third, and they won it after Braden Holtby denied Ekblad at the doorstep early in overtime. Immediately following that save, Carlson hit Wilson for the game-winner on a 2-on-1 rush, giving the Caps a 5-4 comeback win just 17 seconds into overtime.
Tonight, the game-winner again went off Wilson's stick, but at the other end of the ice and in a situation where he had been on the ice for the entirety of the extra period. But on a night when they made multiple goaltending changes, played with 11 forwards for most of the game and were down three pucks late in the second, the Caps were happy to have pulled a point from a tough two-game trip to Florida.
"There's things that we could have done better right in front of our net, that led to some goals," says Laviolette. "I loved the fight. I thought the guys played hard, they never stopped playing, they never quit. They just kept battling and we found ourselves in a game.
"I thought we could have the lead at times, and it just didn't happen. We get to overtime and we never really got possession of the puck from the face-off on. We had one guy stuck out there for the whole two minutes waiting to get over the boards and just couldn't get him over there. And from that standpoint, it's frustrating to not get the second point."
With the win, Florida extends its streak to 10 straight games (9-0-1) with a point while Washington has now picked up a point in nine of its first 10 (5-1-4) for the second straight season.