Jared McCann’s goal at 14:33 of the third period snapped a 3-3 tie and sent the Caps to their first home ice setback of the season on Sunday afternoon, 5-3 to the Seattle Kraken at Capital One Arena. The veteran Seattle forward caught a perfect Brandon Montour feed in stride, gained the zone as the lone Kraken skater in a triangle of red sweaters, cut to his left and let a shot fly that beat Logan Thompson on the glove side.
While Washington was pressing for an equalizer, Ryan Winterton broke loose and scored on a breakaway with 2:40 left, putting the game out of reach for the Caps, who won two of the three games on their season-opening homestand.
“We make a poor mistake at the end there to give up the game-winner,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “We’re just making too many mistakes – a lot of mistakes – with the puck, poor decisions. We’ve just got to get to work on being a smarter team.”
With Pierre-Luc Dubois under the weather and unavailable for Sunday’s game, the Caps were forced to alter their forward lines, and all four were changed up because of Dubois’ absence. Those alterations led to a couple of Washington skaters bagging their first goals of the season in the first period, but the Caps ultimately didn’t play well enough and didn’t limit their mistakes enough to expect to win Sunday’s game.
Washington had a pair of early power play opportunities that overlapped to the tune of a dozen seconds worth of a two-man advantage in the game’s first three minutes, but they couldn’t take advantage of those Kraken infractions. The Caps didn’t have another power play opportunity over the remainder of the game.
“We just have to move the puck quicker,” says Caps captain Alex Ovechkin of his team’s power play. “If we’re going to hold the puck, the PK is just going to stand there and wait until it’s going to happen. If we’re going to move the puck, everything’s going to open up, and we’re going to have a chance to shoot the puck and score goals.”
Less than two minutes after killing off those early penalties, Seattle jumped out to a 1-0 lead at 6:06 when Kaapo Kakko potted the rebound of a Vince Dunn point shot.
Thompson thwarted Kraken captain Jordan Eberle with a glove snare of his shot on a 2-on-1 rush, and less than a minute later, the Caps squared the score.
Ryan Leonard gained the zone on the right side and curled, looking for options. He spotted Cole Hutson coming off the bench and entering the zone and fed him perfectly. In turn, Hutson put the puck right on Jordan Kyrou’s tape in the left circle, and the winger pushed it into the yawning cage at 11:41, notching his first goal as a Capital.
“It feels great to get my first, finally,” says Kyrou. “I got a couple of chances, and it was nice for that one to go in. It was a great play by Leno and Huttie there.”
Just over five minutes later, the Caps struck again to take a brief lead. With Aliaksei Protas applying forechecking heat behind the Seattle net, Riker Evans’ exit feed was blunted, and Ilya Protas collected it and bumped it to the slot for Ovechkin, who shelved his first of the season at 16:47, putting the Caps up 2-1.
“Training camp didn’t go the right way, the way I wanted it to,” says Ovechkin, who didn’t play any preseason games because of a lower body ailment. “So, you’re going to find your touches and you’re going to find your game rhythm, and I think the last two games we have a nice chance to score, and we did.”
Washington yielded the tying goal on a dismal defensive zone shift late in the period, one in which it failed to exit its end cleanly. Eberle scored to make it a 2-2 game with 10.1 seconds left in the first, hammering three shots in short succession until the third one found its way over the line.
The second period was sloppy and almost completely bereft of flow, with 10 face-offs before the six-minute mark. The Caps were too frequently guilty of trying to make a play high in Seattle ice, only to turn it over and head back to defend. Washington went fallow offensively in the middle of the frame, going more than five and a half minutes without testing Seattle goaltender Joey Daccord.
During that span, Seattle center Freddy Gaudreau continued his hot start, netting his fourth goal of the season at 13:24. From below the goal line, Winterton found Gaudreau alone in front and the veteran pivot went to his back hand and lifted it home.
The Caps came out with some purpose in the third, and Boone Jenner was able to generate the tying tally by burying his own rebound at the 46-second mark of the final frame, making it 3-3 and bringing some life to the building.
After killing off a Dylan Strome tripping call – and nearly taking the lead on an Aliaksei Protas shorthanded bid – the Caps kept at it, but they could not squeak one past Daccord. The Caps’ third-period total of 17 shots was somewhat deceiving; four of them came in the first 46 seconds, leading to the Jenner goal. Six of them came after Winterton’s breakaway goal gave Seattle a two-goal cushion.
Ultimately, poor puck decisions were the main culprit in Sunday’s setback. The Washington power play missed out on an early chance to seize momentum, and the Caps were never quite able to grab it for any length of time.
“We played into giving them momentum, and we couldn’t find a way out of it,” says Carbery. “It’s just the puck play and turning it over. And we’ll get it fixed, but it’s going to take some time, and guys have to learn.
“We need to become a more intelligent team; you’ve seen it through the first four games. We make some crazy decisions in bad times, where I know I feel it on the bench and everybody in the building is like, ‘What is that?’ And you just can’t do that at this level. If you want to be a good team and you want to compete, you can’t do that. And we do that consistently.
“We’ll work on it, and we’ll show it, and we’ll talk to guys and we’ll develop these guys and make them better. We just have to become a smarter hockey team overall.”
Seattle’s victory pushed it to a 4-2-0 start on the season, and the Kraken is now perfect through the first two games of its five-game Eastern road swing.
“We started off with a couple of huge penalty kills right off the bat,” says Seattle coach Lane Lambert. “Our goaltender played really well when we needed him to, for sure. And I thought we just stuck with it most of the night. Certainly when they scored their third goal there early in the third period, I liked our response on the bench. I liked the fact that the guys that were on the ice – that got scored on – just went right to the center ice dot and lined up. In other words, ‘Don’t take me off the ice.’ That means a lot to me. I think there was pretty good commitment all over the ice tonight; we had a lot of blocked shots.”
