Despite solving three-time Vezina Trophy winner Connor Hellebuyck for four goals on Saturday night at Capital One Arena, the Caps fell to the New Jersey Devils for the second time in three nights, losing a wild and wooly 7-4 affair to their Metropolitan Division rivals.
The Capitals pumped 47 shots on Hellebuyck – including 24 in a frenetic third period – their highest single-game total in nearly four years, Cole Hutson became the first rookie Caps defenseman to have a three-assist game since 1990, and the promising youthful trio of Hutson, Ryan Leonard and Ilya Protas all factored on the same goal for the first time, but none of it was enough to put Washington in the win column.
“Against a really good hockey team with one of the best goalies in the world, I thought we did a lot of really, really good things,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “And that's unfortunate because when you do as many good things as we did tonight, you would expect to get two points. So, that's extremely frustrating because of how much we carried play at 5-on-5, all the great things we did with the puck in the offensive zone, stressing them, out [offensive] zone timing them … generating slot shots; we double them up in that.
“So, all these different areas that we try to check those boxes going in each game is, if we do this, this, this, and this, we've got a good chance of winning. And yeah, same story, and we’ve got to learn. This has been going on throughout the year. It’s our whole group, it's not just the young guys, our whole group. We have to learn to play winning hockey for 60 minutes.”
Saturday’s opening period was a high event frame to open a high event game. Less than two minutes after Hellebuyck stopped Dylan Strome on a short ice breakaway, Pierre-Luc Dubois staked the Caps to a 1-0 lead, extending his goal-scoring streak to four in the process.
Hellebuyck made the save on a Jakob Chychrun clapper, but the puck sat between the feet of Devils defenseman Anton Silaev, until Dubois pulled it out and sent it to the twine on the short side, lifting Washington to a 1-0 lead at 5:13.
Just over three minutes later, New Jersey squared the score when Lenni Hameenaho scored his second goal in as many NHL games this season, both against the Caps. Cody Glass issued a perfect feed through a seam off the rush, and Hameenaho’s one-timer from the inside of the left circle eluded Washington netminder Charlie Lindgren at 8:15.
Just after the midpoint of the period, Lindgren preserved the slim lead with a stellar stop on ex-Cap Connor Brown on a short ice 2-on-1. Brown would be heard from again later, though. Two minutes later, Lindgren thwarted Jesper Bratt’s bid for the go-ahead goal.
Ryan Leonard restored the Caps’ lead at 14:34, cranking a one-timer through Hellebuyck from the top of the right circle, with Hutson blindly jumping rope to avoid the blast coming from behind him. It was Leonard’s third goal in as many games against New Jersey this season.
New Jersey had the lone power play of the period, and the Devils evened the game again when Brown booted the puck home with his left skate at 17:08, a power-play goal. Officials conducted a video review and concluded that Brown hadn’t used a distinct kicking motion, so the goal stood, and the game was again tied.
Carbery said after the game he figured the call on the Brown goal had a 50/50 chance of being overturned by an official review. The bounces have not been plentiful for the Caps of late.
But with 1:20 remaining in the first, Anthony Beauvillier gave Washington its third lead of the night, scoring on a goalmouth scramble in the aftermath of a Hellebuyck save on Boone Jenner, a stop that left the goalie prone and out of position when Beauvillier found it and buried it.
Early in the second, the Caps had a power play opportunity and a chance to open up a two-goal lead, something they had been unable to accomplish in their previous two games on the road trip. But the Caps needed Lindgren to make a sprawling stop on Devils defenseman Dougie Hamilton during that power play, and even worse, the Caps went shorthanded in the waning seconds of the power play when Leonard was assessed a double-minor for hi-sticking.
Washington managed to kill off the four minutes of New Jersey’s man advantage, but before the Caps could derive any momentum from the kill, Devils forward Jesper Boqvist tied it up by burying a rebound in the slot after a Lindgren stop on Hameenaho at 10:33.
Hellebuyck preserved the deadlock with a nifty stop on Ilya Protas, who was trying to convert an Alex Ovechkin feed from the top of the paint.
That save was magnified less than two minutes later when the Devils went on their fourth man advantage of the game. Although the Caps won the initial draw to start the kill, they failed to clear the zone, and 14 seconds later, Timo Meier jammed in the go-ahead goal from the top of the paint at 16:18, giving New Jersey its first lead of the night.
The high-event hockey never let up, and if anything it may have been amplified in the third. Within the first 90 seconds of the period, Washington went on a power play, yielded a shorthanded goal to Nico Hischier – stretching the Devils’ lead to two – and then pulled within one again at 5-4 on an Ilya Protas power-play goal.
Alas, less than two minutes later, New Jersey went up by a pair again on an excruciating goal from Evan Rodrigues. From the left half wall, the veteran put a shot on net which Lindgren kicked aside with his left pad. But the puck then bounded off Timothy Liljegren’s skate and in, restoring the New Jersey two-goal lead at 6-4, at 3:18 of the third.
And despite Washington’s best efforts and two dozen third-period shots on Hellebuyck – many of them excellent chances – the Caps couldn’t close that gap.
Rodrigues tacked on an empty-net goal to account for the 7-4 final.
The Devils improve to a gaudy 13-2-0 in their last 15 games, and Hellebuyck becomes the first NHL goaltender since Logan Thompson in 2024 to win his first seven decisions with a new team.
“We have been talking here about nights when you don’t quite have it, your special teams have got to carry you a bit,” says New Jersey coach Sheldon Keefe. “Two power-play goals, a shorthanded goal, and great goaltending. All that stuff stacks up to help you find a way to win a game when you don’t have it, and you’re on fumes and you just grind through and try to get through the game.”
The Caps are now 10-8-0 on the season, and they’re heading into a difficult week where they will make two one-game road trips sandwiched around a stand-alone home game. They know they’re capable of playing better, playing more detailed, and playing more cohesive.
“I just think it's little moments,” says Dubois. “Like I said there's teams in this League that just try to outscore the opponent; it doesn't end well a lot of times. And there are teams that play to win. And chipping a puck in the corner and forechecking is not fun. But sometimes you have to do it because the team needs it.
“I think that we're a good team in here; a lot of good individuals, good people that care, that want to win. But there are little moments in games. You look at our last couple losses, it's not horrible. It's just moments in those games that it's just an easy mistake that leads to a goal or leads to a penalty that leads to a goal, and we're a better team than that. So, it's frustrating.”
