These last 27 hours or so displayed the 2025-26 Washington Capitals at their best and at their worst. A night after dismantling the Buffalo Sabres – the League’s hottest team over the previous four months – by a 6-2 count on home ice, the Caps traveled north to New York’s Madison Square Garden, but their game took a sharp turn in a southerly direction.
Sunday night in Manhattan against the New York Rangers – the last-place team in the Eastern Conference – the Caps were demolished 8-1 on the strength of a Will Cuylle hat trick and a five-goal outburst by the Blueshirts in the middle frame.
“Quite honestly, right from puck drop, first shift of the game,” responds Caps coach Spencer Carbery, asked when Sunday’s game slipped away from his squad. “It doesn’t decide the game, but you can see we get behind the eight-ball.
“A frustrating night, for whatever reason; we just did not have anything tonight. We just looked really slow, we couldn’t move, and then the execution to go along with it. We just didn’t have it today.”
As Carbery noted, the game started ominously; Washington fell down by a goal less than half a minute into the contest when ex-Cap Conor Sheary scored on a rebound from in tight, biting the hand that once fed him just 23 seconds after opening puck drop.
In the back half of the frame, the Caps pulled even when Tom Wilson sent Connor McMichael in on a breakaway, and the latter beat Igor Shesterkin to knot the score at 1-1 at 13:45.
Over the remaining minutes of the second, the Caps had some sustained offensive zone shifts, and they even stacked a couple of them together, but nothing changed on the scoreboard.
“I honestly thought our first period was pretty good,” says McMichael. “Obviously, they scored on the first shift, but I thought after that we were controlling play, getting a couple good looks and extended [offensive] zone time. And I don't know what you want to chalk it up to, but at the end of the day, it just wasn't good enough.”
The game took a southerly turn late in the frame when Dylan Strome was whistled for backhanding the puck over the glass with 58 seconds left. While the Caps were able to kill that carryover penalty successfully, they went right back on the kill for the exact same infraction seven seconds later; this time with Anthony Beauvillier backhanding the puck over the window.
Washington was two seconds away from killing that one, too, when J.T. Miller scored on a back door tap-in, putting New York up 2-1.
This period, the Rangers didn’t stop at one.
Cuylle scored at the back door on a feed from Braden Schneider at 5:53 to make it a 3-1 game. That goal placed more importance on the Caps’ power play when Cuylle was boxed for holding less than a minute later.
But the Caps couldn’t cash in with the extra man, and the hole promptly got a goal deeper when Cuylle stepped out of the box and scored again, five seconds later on a bullet of a shot to the short side shelf at 8:33.
The onslaught continued with an Adam Sykora goal at 13:22, and an Adam Fox power-play tally at 18:27, putting the Caps in a deep 6-1 ditch after 40 minutes of play. Washington managed only seven shots in each of the first two periods, and had none across the final seven minutes of the second when the Rangers scored twice.
Frustration set in over the final three minutes of the miserable middle period, and Jakob Chychrun fought Cuylle. Less than a minute later, Brandon Duhaime dropped the mitts with New York’s Tye Kartye.
The third period opened with a Vincent Trocheck goal to push the lead to 7-1 at 2:27. The final frame also featured another fight, between Washington’s Hendrix Lapierre and New York’s Noah Laba. With just 31.5 seconds left, Cuylle finished the hat trick with a shot from the slot, notching his second consecutive 20-goal season in the process.
“It’s very disappointing,” says Caps defenseman Matt Roy. “Just a flat game I think, through and through for us. It’s just a really bad time for us to have a game like that.”
Sunday’s game marked the 26th time in franchise history that the Caps were dented for as many as five goals in the second period of a game, but just the second time in this century and first since Jan. 16, 2017 in an 8-7 loss to the Penguins in Pittsburgh.
Washington has also yielded seven or more goals in consecutive road games for the first time in over seven years, since Jan. 15-20, 2019.
“I think it starts with defense, obviously,” says Washington forward Aliaksei Protas. “You look at the score, I feel like we give up too many odd man rushes. We can’t just throw [goaltender] Chucky [Lindgren] under the bus like this, especially in that time of the year when we need points.
“We need to win, like we've always been talking about. It doesn't matter how it looks, but it just can't look like this. We’ve got to find a way even if it's back to back; they're also in the same spot. We just got to find the way to be way faster, way smarter with the puck, and we didn’t do it tonight.”
