Caps' Winning Road Run Ends in Philly

The Caps' franchise record seven-game road winning streak came to an end on Wednesday night in Philadelphia in a 5-3 loss to the Flyers. Travis Konecny notched a hat trick for the Flyers, who won for the sixth time in their last seven games and never trailed in Wednesday's contest.

Washington lost the special teams battle decisively on Wednesday night in Philadelphia, and for a while in the third period, it appeared as though the Caps might also lose the game decisively. The Capitals mustered a late comeback that fell a goal short, and they ultimately fell by two goals when Konecny scored a power-play goal into an empty net with 12.3 seconds remaining in the game.
Konecny's late third-period goal completed his hat trick; he scored a pivotal even-strength goal in the waning seconds of the first period and netted a shorthanded strike in the third, a goal that pushed the Flyers' lead to 4-1 before the Caps tightened it up with a pair of goals in the third.
Not only did Washington get outscored 3-0 on special teams, it went shorthanded five times and had just one power play of its own, and that lone man advantage only widened its deficit. The Caps fell down 1-0 on Philly's first power play of the game, and they were chasing the contest for the rest of the night.
"The [Konecny] goal right at the end of the first, that hurt," laments Laviolette. "All the penalties early on in the game takes away from the 5-on-5, and the sync on the bench and the rhythm on the bench. You're using all your penalty killers and your power play guys are not getting out there regularly.
"In the third, I thought we kept fighting back and I thought that we had the chances to tie that game, and we just didn't get it done. That's frustrating, but there's things that we did where we shot ourselves in the foot."
Philadelphia jumped out to a 1-0 lead, scoring on its first power play of the evening. Just 13 seconds after Caps captain Alex Ovechkin was seated for tripping, Flyers forward Scott Laughton sent a center point shot to the back of the net to put the home team up by a goal at 7:26.
"We have to continue to focus on those big momentum swinging shifts," says Caps winger Garnet Hathaway. "That first power play, that's one that we want to stop. And when that goes in, we're already fighting back. We want to score the first goal of the game, and we didn't. So if you want to say that we're already clawing back from there, that's when it started."
Flyers goalie Carter Hart protected his team's slim lead when he stopped Ovechkin on a breakaway try just after the midpoint of the first frame.
The Flyers seized momentum for a spell following a second power play later in the first, but the Caps pulled even on the scoreboard in the final minute of the period. Nic Dowd made an indirect feed to Nick Jensen in neutral ice, and Jensen was able to get wide and carry into Philly ice down the right-wing wall. As he reached the bottom of the circle, Jensen fed Hathaway, who drove the net and had an easy back door tap-in to make it a 1-1 game at 19:06.
But the score didn't remain tied for long. Philly regained the lead on the very next shift, just 21 seconds later when Joel Farabee fed Konecny in front, and the latter scored from the top of the paint with 32.5 seconds remaining in the first, and just 20.9 seconds after Hathaway had tied it for Washington.
"It was an important goal," says Flyers' coach John Tortorella of Konecny's first goal. "My thinking is we just want to get out of there without getting scored on. I think it's a play that needs to be stopped. We don't, but we answer right away. So, we end up leaving the period with a lead anyway. A lot of important situations throughout the game, that was one of them early."
The second period was scoreless, but the Caps needed a pair of big early saves from Kuemper to keep it that way. In the first minute of the middle period, the Caps' goalie stopped Konecny on a 2-on-0 break that had its genesis in an Evgeny Kuznetsov turnover at the Philadelphia line. About half a minute later, Kuemper thwarted an Owen Tippett wrist shot from the slot.
Washington put together a strong shift to start the third, getting a trio of excellent looks, but missing the net on all three. Those misfires loomed larger when Tippett scored on a wrister from the top of the right circle at 5:31 of the third and Konecny netted his second of the night, a shorthanded goal that came on a 2-on-1 rush during Washington's first power play of the game, at 7:28 of the third.
Less than two minutes after the Konecny goal, the Caps pulled to within a pair once again when Ivan Provorov tturned the puck over, and Marcus Johansson quickly fired it into the back of the Philly net from the slot at 9:18.
Playing his second game of the season after missing the front half of the campaign while recovering from hip resurfacing surgery, Nicklas Backstrom picked up his first point of the season when he set up T.J. Oshie's backhander to the shelf at 14:42 of the third, pulling the Caps to within a goal at 4-3.
"I told [Backstrom] earlier that I was struggling to get him the puck tonight," says Oshie. "It usually works out better when he has it in his hands and gets it to me. Always nice to get one on the tape from [No.] 19. He's going to get his assists, that's for sure. But I'm sure it's nice for him to get that first one out of the way, and away we go."
With Kuemper pulled for an extra attacker, the Caps bid for the equalizer fell short when Oshie was taken off for hooking Farabee with 1:19 left, setting the stage for Konecny's hat trick goal and the end of the Caps' historic road run.
"[The Flyers] did a good job tonight, pressuring," says Oshie. "They were playing hard, they were checking hard, and doing a pretty good job trying to keep us to the exterior in the [offensive] zone. And we struggled a little bit breaking the puck out, and moving it down the ice and getting a deep, so not definitely not our best."