Facing the NHL’s best team to close out a four-game homestand on a Sunday afternoon, the Capitals played a strong and sturdy game against the Colorado Avalanche at Capital One Arena. On many days/nights against many NHL teams, it would have been enough for the Caps to skate away with two points, but against the opportunistic Avs, the Caps had to settle for a single point in a 3-2 overtime loss.
Off a fine feed from Martin Necas, Brock Nelson scored on a back door tap in at 1:22 of overtime to lift the Avs over the Caps. Colorado won the opening face-off of the extra session, and it out-changed the Capitals, getting fresh players on the ice while the Caps had the same starting trio out there for the entirety of overtime.
“That’s kind of the plan there with Marty in a 3-on-3 situation,” explains Nelson, “it’s to get him the puck and then try to get open. He’s so good at creating space for himself and for everybody else with how shifty he is, how quick he is and his possession play.”
For the third straight game and for the 12th time in 49 starts this season, Caps goaltender Logan Thompson carried a shutout into the game’s final frame, and today’s game marks the first time in those dozen games that Washington did not get two points (11-0-1).
The Caps carried a precarious 1-0 lead into the third period, but the Avs capitalized on a pair of Washington mistakes to score on their first two shots of the final frame, taking a 2-1 lead. On all three Colorado goals, Washington had the puck on its stick in its own end, but turnovers resulted in all three Avalanche goals.
“I thought overall, we did a good job for the most part against – like I said before the game – as good a team as there is in the National Hockey League,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “They’re sitting where they are – with 100 points – for a reason, so they cause you all sorts of issues and they’re having a fantastic season.
“If you look at the game as a whole and how we played through that and the opponent, I thought we did a good job for the most part. [There are] three specific instances where we just failed to manage that, which, when it’s a tight game, those become big plays.”
Connor McMichael and Matt Roy combined to set up Justin Sourdif for the game’s first goal just after the midpoint of the first period. The Caps went 200 feet in seconds to grab that early lead.
Roy stopped a Colorado offensive zone shift behind the Caps’ cage and put the puck to Justin Sourdif along the half wall in Washington ice. Sourdif fed McMichael near the Washington line and then took off with a step on his pursuers. McMichael lofted a lead feed for Sourdif, who arrived first, tamed the bouncing puck and fired it past MacKenzie Blackwood for a 1-0 Washington lead at 11:53.
“Roy made a nice head man pass to me,” recounts Sourdif. “And I saw Mikey was open; I gave it to him. I saw a couple of their forwards were heading off, and both of their [defensemen] slid over to Mikey, so I just thought I’d make a break for it. And he saw me, and he made a really nice lob pass.”
That slimmest of margins held up until early in the third when Thompson’s own misplay of the puck deep in Washington ice resulted in an easy empty-net goal for Avs coach Gabriel Landeskog at 1:05 of the third, squaring the score at 1-1.
Just under five minutes later, the Caps again failed to clear the zone with the puck on their stick, and a turnover resulted in Nicolas Roy’s go-ahead goal on a shot from the slot at 6:03.
Trailing for the first time on the homestand – and since March 12 overall – the Caps were able to claw their way even on a late power play.
Caps captain Alex Ovechkin scored his first power-play goal on home ice this season, and his first power-play goal on a one-timer from his left dot office this season as well. The goal was enough to help the Caps pick up a much-needed standings point, and it was also the 1,000th goal – regular season and Stanley Cup playoffs combined – of Ovechkin’s career.
Ovechkin’s latest milestone comes 50 weeks to the day after he scored the 895th regular season goal of his career against the Islanders in New York, passing Wayne Gretzky (894) for the all-time NHL goals record.
“It’s always nice to reach [a milestone], and it was an important goal as well,” says Ovechkin.
Caps rookie defenseman Cole Hutson started the scoring play from behind the Colorado net, getting the puck to Dylan Strome at center point. Strome teed up Ovechkin for the milestone marker and the game-tying tally.
Today’s game concludes Washington’s final multi-game homestand of the season; the Caps will play just three of their final 11 games of the second on home ice. Washington is 13-16-4 on the road this season, and its .455 points pct. ranks 27th in the NHL.
The Caps are again going to need to summon their best game as they head out on a three-game trip on Monday. Washington will carry a five-game overall point streak (3-0-2) with it on Monday’s flight to St. Louis.
“They also make some mistakes as well that give us opportunities, too,” says Carbery of the Avs. “So, you can’t say, ‘I wish we wouldn’t have done that one thing.’ Mistakes happen in a game for both teams, and so we just make a few that end up in the back of our net, but so did they. We just didn’t do quite enough.”
