A couple of ex-Caps combined to halt Washington’s modest two-game winning run on Tuesday night at Capital One Arena. With the Peter Laviolette-coached Los Angeles Kings in town for the middle match of the Caps’ five-game homestand, Washington squandered an early 2-0 lead, surrendering five unanswered goals in a 5-2 setback to the Kings. The five unanswered goals started with two Kings goals in the final 34 seconds of the first period.
For Los Angeles, Tuesday’s triumph ended a six-game slide (0-4-2) to start the season.
Ex-Caps goalie Darcy Kuemper was excellent, making 30 saves for his first victory of the season, and stopping all 23 shots he faced after Cole Hutson’s power-play goal doubled the Caps’ lead in the first period.
Ex-Caps defenseman Erik Gustafsson snapped a 2-2 tie with a dazzling individual effort on a power-play goal of his own at 7:28 of the third, and that proved to be the game-winner as Washington dipped to 4-2 on home ice this season. Both losses have come at the hands of a Western Conference opponent.
“To be down 2-0,” begins Kuemper, “I think it would have been easy for us to put our heads down and say, ‘Here we go again; another one getting away from us.’ But instead, we got a huge response by those guys.
“What a shift to get two goals to finish the period, and then you feel like you’re right back in the game and feel like you have a chance. And like I said, we wanted to get that monkey off our back, and you could see everyone bear down and get the job done.”
Ryan Leonard started the scoring for Washington just ahead of the midpoint of the first. After taking a feed from Jonny Brodzinski, Leonard gained the zone, surveyed, cut to the slot and let a shot fly. It beat Kuemper for a 1-0 Washington lead at 9:25.
“Just a standard 3-on-2, 4-on-2, whatever it was,” says Leonard of his fourth goal of the season. “Guys just went to the net, and I had a really good screen; all I had to do was hit the net.”
Late in the period, the Caps went on the game’s first power play and they cashed in. After Kuemper denied a Dylan Strome bid from in tight, the Caps regrouped and re-entered, with Hutson taking a Jordan Kyrou feed into Los Angeles ice. From between the circles, Hutson ripped a wrist shot past Kuemper for a 2-0 Caps lead at 18:35.
Had the period ended there, it would have been a splendid one for Washington. Alas, it did not, and the Caps managed to give it all back in the final 34 seconds of the frame.
First, Hutson had a shot blocked in Los Angeles ice, and the Kings quickly turned in the opposite direction and started a 2-on-1 with Artemi Panarin carrying down the right side. Panarin fed Adrian Kempe, who hopped off the bench and beat Logan Thompson on the short side, cutting the Caps’ cushion to 2-1 with 32.7 seconds left in the first.
Despite the Kings being deep in their own end with 15 seconds remaining, the Caps yielded the tying tally in the waning seconds of the frame. Los Angeles moved it up the ice quickly and efficiently, but the Caps regained possession behind their own net with about five seconds remaining. A play to the half wall wasn’t clean, and Panarin snagged it and whipped a shot past Thompson from the bottom of the left circle with 1.2 seconds left.
The Kings had scored exactly one goal in each of their previous four games, but they found a late pair in the first against Washington to quickly erase the Caps’ two-goal lead.
“The first one is an odd man rush,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery of the four and fifth of five goals his team has yielded in the final 71 seconds of a period in its last five games. “They get a little bit of a line change, but we still should have somebody back in that spot right there. So, that mistake can’t happen that late in the period, not smart.
“The second one was just a failed wall play; [Brodzinski] gets a little bit of a bad bounce there, but we still need to do a better job with that puck; it can’t kick to the middle on that wall play.”
The middle frame was scoreless, and the Caps generated some good chances but couldn’t regain the lead. One of their best scoring opportunities of the middle frame came during a stretch of 4-on-4 hockey when the Caps came within a whisker of executing a nifty tic-tac-toe passing play.
From the right point, Dylan Strome put a diagonal feed down low to Alex Tuch near the bottom of the left circle. Tuch quickly zipped it cross crease to Jakob Chychrun at the right post, and Kuemper denied the defenseman’s one-time bid. But Chychrun wasn’t sure his shot would have been on the mark anyway.
“I don't even know if that would have went in, honestly,” says Chychrun. “[Tuch] made a heck of a play. He rifled it at me, and it was just a little behind me. I couldn't really just get it enough to that short side, just with the pace he put on it. If I could do it back, I'd probably try to stop it, one touch it, and try to get a little more [to the] short side because obviously I had a lot of net. I just couldn't readjust to it and get it enough on that short side.”
The Caps put some heat on the Kings in the offensive zone late in the second and early in the third. And when Leonard drew a hooking call on Kings captain Drew Doughty early in the final frame, the Caps had an extra-man opportunity with which to regain the lead. But Kuemper kept both Strome and Leonard off the board, and soon the Kings were on a power play of their own, aiming to take their first lead of the night.
That’s when Gustafsson stepped to the fore. From between the circles in his own end of the ice, Gustafsson skated through four red sweaters with little resistance, and lifted a little chip shot over Thompson’s right pad to give the Kings a 3-2 lead at 7:28.
“That was unbelievable,” says Kempe of the game-winning goal. “Gus is one hell of a player. And offensively, he can make a lot of plays.”
Just over four minutes later, Kempe netted his second of the night, another goal from the top of the paint that gave Kuemper some breathing room he would not require. Scott Laughton’s empty-net goal accounted for the 5-2 final and represents the most goals the Kings have scored in a game this season.
Los Angeles picked up its first win of the season in the opener of a five-game trip, and ow it heads to the New York metro area for its next three games.
“I thought the shift at the end of the first period, to get two goals like that,” says Laviolette, asked how his team got it done. “You get the one and you’re thinking you’ve cut it in half. And then you grab another quick one like that on the same shift. That was – I think – really important.
“And then it just set up the third period, and I really liked our third period, I liked our response to win a hockey game. So, it was good. We got real good play from that top line with [Alex] Laferriere, Panarin and Kempe. I thought that our goaltender was terrific tonight; Darcy played great for us.”
