Caps Stop Short Slide with 3-2 Win over Wings

Playing their third road game in a span of about 72 hours and doing so at the relatively rare start time of 5 p.m., the Washington Capitals were not a high-energy bunch on Sunday in Detroit. But a tweak of their forward lines and a well-placed point shot were just enough to get them out of Motown with a 3-2 win, halting a short three-game slide (0-2-1).

Michal Kempny floated a center point shot through traffic and behind Detroit goaltender Jimmy Howard with 3:54 remaining to snap a 2-2 tie and put the Caps on top, and Washington's penalty killing outfit snuffed out a late Red Wings bid to tie the game on the man advantage.

"We stuck with it," says Caps coach Todd Reirden. "The ice wasn't in great condition tonight early on, early start time and some different stuff, but we battled through it. I liked our perseverance tonight. We did some fine things when we needed to, and getting pucks to the net, some scoring from some different people, and it was important for us tonight."
Washington jumped out to a 1-0 lead in the first half of the first frame. After a strong offensive zone shift from the Nicklas Backstrom line, Evgeny Kuznetsov's trio came over the boards next, and they piggybacked on the good work of the previous shift to give Washington the lead. Kuznetsov pulled the puck out of a pile of humanity at the Detroit goalmouth and fed Tom Wilson, who whipped a wrister home from the bottom of the right circle at 6:57 of the first.

Detroit got even on a Capitals miscue late in the first. Jakub Vrana turned the puck over at the Washington line, giving Anthony Mantha a short-ice breakaway. Mantha got Braden Holtby to open up, and he tucked a backhander through the five-hole of the Caps' goaltender to knot the score at 14:08.
The Caps started the second period with 37 seconds worth of carryover power play time, but they came out flat and stayed that way until the Wings pushed past them. Alex Ovechkin turned the puck over high in Detroit ice and the Wings blazed back to take their first lead of the game in transition.

Gustav Nyquist carried into Washington ice on the left wing side and went cross-ice to Dylan Larkin at the right wing wall. Larkin put the puck right down by the back door for defenseman Filip Hronek, who chipped it over Holtby to finish the tic-tac-toe sequence, giving Detroit a 2-1 advantage at 6:48.
The Caps couldn't convert on another carryover power play at the outset of the third, and it took an alteration to the lines to spark their comeback.
Reirden flipped his two bottom six pivots, putting Travis Boyd between Andre Burakovsky and Brett Connolly, and placing Lars Eller between Chandler Stephenson and Devante Smith-Pelly in the third. Both units did good work, and the Caps were able to pull even while Ovechkin was out with Boyd and Connolly.
The tying tally came on a bit of a give-and-go play between Boyd and Ovechkin, with the former supplying the finish to square the score at 6:19 of the third.

"Good breakout, Connolly up to me, and I kind of had a three-on-two," recounts Boyd. "I brought it in and was able to get both [defensemen] to come over to me, and Ovi was wide open. Great play by him; obviously he's got the shot that can score there, but he dished it over to me and I had a wide-open net. I was lucky to be able to sneak it in there, just barely."
A day after being named as the Metro Division coach for the 2019 NHL All-Star Game, Reirden pushed the right buttons at the right time to give his team a spark.
"Tonight it was important," says Reirden of the line adjustments. "It felt like we needed a little bit of a spark. I moved some things around a couple of times."
With time winding down and overtime looming, Howard stopped Kuznetsov's rush try, pushing the puck into the corner where the Caps center went after it. Kuznetsov fed Kempny, and after an exchange with partner Matt Niskanen, Kempny let it fly, and it found purchase behind Howard, who said after the game that he never saw it.
"It was a little bit of lucky," says Kempny. "The [Wings defender] in front of me tipped it. Good screen and a great win for us."

The win enables the Caps to come home all even (1-1-1) from their first road trip of the New Year, a journey through the Midwest in which they played three games in four nights.
Detroit wasn't able to string together consecutive wins for the first time in more than a month, and the Caps swept the season's series from the Red Wings, taking all three games in regulation.
"We did a number of good things," says Wings coach Jeff Blashill. "We played good hockey; it ebbed and flowed back and forth. What I didn't like was I thought we made preventable mistakes on the two goals, and they cost us. So if you don't score that extra goal, then you've got to play fairly mistake free, and I thought they were fairly preventable mistakes."