"I liked our first period," says Brind'Amour. "It was just unfortunate that we got down three. I thought we started the first 10 minutes way better than I thought it was going to be."
After taking a second offensive-zone penalty early in the second, the Hurricanes mounted a second-period push. Washington weathered that storm, keeping the Canes off the board. Holtby made an impressive left shoulder stop on Sebastian Aho on a Carolina power play, thwarting the Canes' best chance of the middle period. The Caps had two more power plays in the second, and they teed up eight shot tries but got none on net; six missed the mark and two were blocked.
All Washington did in the second period was take 20 minutes off the clock. The Caps managed only four shots on net, three of them from blueliners and none from closer than 34 feet away.
Carolina dialed up its desperation in the third, and that enabled the Caps to get their best scoring chances of the night at even strength, but Mrazek set them all aside to keep his team in the contest. He stopped Nic Dowd's rush chance a couple of minutes into the final period, thwarted Carl Hagelin's breakaway bid a minute or so later, and then made successive stellar stops on Brett Connolly and then Lars Eller, who got hold of the rebound of Connolly's shot.
Ten seconds after the save on Eller, Carolina's teenage rookie Andrei Svechnikov scored off the rush, slipping a shot through some traffic in tight to make it a 3-1 game at 5:07. On his very next shift, Svechnikov struck again, this time beating Holtby on a one-timer off a good blind feed from Lucas Wallmark.
With 12:34 on the clock, the Canes had closed within one, and they had all the momentum as well.
Carolina spent four of those last dozen minutes with the man advantage, and they pulled Mrazek to get a six-on-four skater advantage with 55 seconds remaining in the second of those power plays. Washington's penalty killers held the Canes to a single shot on net in those four minutes, a long distance shot from ex-Cap Justin Williams that Holtby set aside.
During that stretch of six-on-four, Backstrom got in the way of a Jaccob Slavin shot and then blocked Svechnikov's late bid for a hat trick in his first career Stanley Cup playoff game. That alleviated some of the pressure, and Eller's empty-netter with 36.6 seconds left finally enabled the sellout crowd at Capital One Arena to collectively exhale.
"Our special teams in general has to be better," says Canes center Jordan Staal. "Both the PK and the power play weren't good enough. In the end, I think five-on-five and the rest of the game was more or less us going and playing our game. But special teams has got to be better if we are going to win some games."
Getting the win is what matters most for the Caps; years from now, few will remember that they weren't exactly stellar over most of this series opener. Now they'll get to work on improving the areas left lacking, starting with their five-on-five play.
"You leave from a game like this, and you're happy with the win," says Reirden. "But we can play better than that. And especially five-on-five for us is an area that we've got to do some work on. There is room for improvement in that spot for sure.
"I thought for the most part we defended it okay, but we can create more off of that. That being said, we had some good chances and missed the net sometimes, and their goalie made some saves when we had the chance to make it 4-0. But that's an area we'll be working on the rest of this evening and getting ready for [Friday's] practice to improve in that area."
