Caps Win Seventh Straight, 6-3 Over Devils

Washington won its seventh straight game on Friday night, downing the Devils 6-3 at Capital One Arena. Nicklas Backstrom notched a hat trick and recorded four points. Braden Holtby was brilliant in goal, continuing a personal stretch of strong play and repeatedly bailing the Caps out when the game was still tight in the second period. Alex Ovechkin scored career goal No. 626, moving past Joe Sakic and Jarome Iginla and in sole possession of 15th place on the league's all-time goal scoring list.

But most of the ink and pixels coming out of Friday's game will certainly be reserved for Tom Wilson, who had an interesting night to say the least. Playing in his 400th career NHL game, Wilson scored the Caps' first shorthanded goal of the season just eight seconds into the second period, establishing a franchise standard for fastest shorthanded goal at the start of a period in the process.

Late in the second period, Wilson was excused for the rest of the night and given a match penalty for a "hit to the head" on New Jersey forward Brett Seney, as it was announced in the arena. Multiple video replays showed Wilson's left shoulder make contract with Seney's right shoulder, with no contact whatsoever to the head, despite Seney immediately throwing both hands over his face - the hit was from behind- and then going down and staying down for several seconds. He was not injured on the play and returned in the third period.
For any other player in the league, this might have resulted in an interference minor, at most.
"I'm having a really tough time with this one," says Caps coach Todd Reirden, "because he isn't even intending to make a hit. It's incidental contact, and he is following his defenseman down the wall, [Seney] backs into him, he tries to get out of the way of the player, makes himself as small as possible, and there is incidental contact.
"He is not even attempting to make a hit, and we get a five-minute penalty that could have cost us the game. This guy is trying to do everything he can to play the game the right way, and this is how things are happening. It's a tough situation, because we just had two players who have concussions they don't even call a penalty on."

One of those players, Evgeny Kuznetsov, returned to the Caps' lineup after missing six games, and there actually was a minor penalty called for an illegal check to the head on that play, which occurred in a Nov. 14 game at Winnipeg.
In five of its wins during the team's current streak, Washington surrendered the game's first goal before getting right and coming back to win. The Caps altered that script on Friday, grabbing an early lead and maintaining it throughout the rest of the contest.
Washington scored first for a change, taking a 1-0 lead on a bit of a neutral zone regroup before the game was four minutes old. Carrying through neutral ice toward his own bench, Ovechkin recognized the Devils were a little slow on the change, so he whirled toward the Devils zone and turned on the jets. Carrying down the right side, he spun Devils defender Damon Severson around and put a pass to the front for Backstrom. From the slot, Backstrom chipped a shot past Keith Kinkaid for a 1-0 Caps lead at 3:51.
The Caps killed off a Devils power play in the first, and were dealing with 38 seconds worth of carryover time at the start of the second when Wilson broke into New Jersey ice unmolested and tucked a misplayed hard-around behind Kinkaid for a 2-0 Caps lead just eight seconds into the middle period.
New Jersey got that one back later in the period, getting a Travis Zajac shorthanded goal in the waning seconds of a Washington power play at 9:23.
In between that Zajac goal and Wilson's encounter with Seney, Holtby denied Seney twice on breakaway bids and also stopped former teammate Marcus Johansson on a breakaway.
The play occurred with 2:21 remaining in the second period, and with the Caps owning a 2-1 lead, and it resulted in a five-minute, all-you-can-eat power play for the Devils, and a glorious chance for a team with five wins in its previous 19 games to pick up a pair of sorely needed points.
Fired up by the loss of Wilson, the Caps made sure it didn't go down like that. With Wilson gone from the game, the Caps killed off the resulting major with aplomb, limiting the Devils to just two shots on net in the five minutes.

"We've been killing well lately," says Holtby, "and I thought we started the game off well. Obviously, there are some emotions running through our team, and I thought we channeled it in the right way, to kill that off for Tommy. I thought that was a big point of the game."
Having killed off the major penalty without incident, the Caps extended their lead to 3-1 on Andre Burakovsky's breakaway goal a little over three minutes later.
With Miles Wood in the box for a rarely called double-minor for butt-ending Dmitry Orlov, and after Sami Vatanen compounded that penalty by hooking Jakub Vrana at the net, Backstrom scored his second goal of the game on a two-man advantage at 10:57.
New Jersey made a game of it, getting a Nico Hischier goal at 12:35 and a Johansson strike at 18:10 to make it a 4-3 game. But the Caps responded with an empty-netter from Ovechkin just 20 seconds later, and the Washington captain set Backstrom up for the hat trick some 67 seconds later to account for the 6-3 final.
"It's a tough situation for our team," Reirden reiterates. "I couldn't be prouder of how our team reacted in the third and killed that off. We discussed it as a group. We have a strong, resilient group in our locker room that deals with adversity in the right way. And whether a call is right or wrong, our team cannot change what happened right there, and we made a stance in between the second and the third that we were going to get the kill and we were going go win the game. But it was put in jeopardy by what I felt was not a correct call."