Monday night’s middle match of the Caps’ three-game homestand at Capital One Arena was a high event barnburner of a hockey game from the first minute to the last. Justin Sourdif had a hat trick and five points to pace the Caps to a 7-4 victory over the Anaheim Ducks. Connor McMichael had four assists, Alex Ovechkin scored a pair of goals, and Charlie Lindgren stopped 41 shots while facing the most shots Washington has yielded in a single game this season.
It all added up to the Caps’ first victory of 2026, and it was achieved without three of their most consistent offensive contributors – P-L Dubois, Aliaksei Protas and Tom Wilson – out of the lineup with varying ailments.
The game featured the aforementioned offensive pyrotechnics along with a couple of fights, two penalty shots – one on each side – and a spirited Anaheim comeback that turned what appeared to be a comfortable 5-1 lead into a tense 5-4 tilt into the waning minutes of the third, when John Carlson and Ovechkin took matters into their own hands, each dialing long distance for a couple of crucial empty net markers.
“The game gets a little bit squirrelly there, and we’ll just burn that film,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “I’ll probably watch it, but it will be painful.
“We’ll take the two points. This was a big game. At the end of the day, this was a huge game for our hockey team; we needed two points tonight. We needed two points, I don’t care what it looked like, I don’t care how many injuries or who is out of the lineup, we needed to find a way … to win a hockey game, and our guys found a way to do that.”
Washington went shorthanded in the game’s first minute, and the Caps killed it off without incident. But longtime Caps killer Chris Kreider staked the Ducks to a 1-0 lead at 6:33 of the first on a one-timer from the right circle. Ducks defenseman Owen Zellweger made a nice cross-ice feed to set up the game’s opening salvo.
Seconds after the Kreider goal, Caps winger Brandon Duhaime fought Ducks defenseman Jacob Trouba; the latter put Ryan Leonard out of action for a couple of weeks after a high and heavy hit in the first meeting between the two teams, a month ago tonight in Anaheim.
Sourdif scored his first goal at 15:56 of the first, taking a backhand dish from McMichael and ripping a shot past Petr Mrazek from the slot to square the score at 1-1.
On his next shift, Sourdif struck again. McMichael intercepted an Anaheim exit bid in neutral ice and sent Sourdif back into Ducks territory. From the top of the right circle, Sourdif shelved a shot to lift the Caps into the lead at 18:58.
Washington opened the second period on the penalty kill, and once again kept the Ducks off the board. Less than a minute after Caps defenseman Dylan McIlrath dropped mitts with Anaheim’s Ross Johnston, Washington added to its lead with a goal on the forecheck.
Leonard got in on the forecheck, and his hit on Ducks defenseman Jackson LaCombe jimmied the puck loose to Sourdif behind the net. Sourdif pushed it back to Leonard, who quickly popped it home from just below the goal line to make it a 3-1 contest at 5:54.
Sourdif completed his hat trick on a pretty tic-tac-toe passing play. First, he carried from his own end deep into Ducks territory, pushing it to McMichael, who bumped it from the slot to Leonard on the left side. Leonard went right back to Sourdif for an easy tap in at the net front, filling the hat trick before the game was half over, at 7:30 of the middle frame.
“Pure excitement,” says Sourdif of lighting the lamp for his first NHL hat trick. “I saw Leno with his arms in the air, and he was super excited. I wanted to skate over to him, because it was just such a nice pass, beautiful play on the goal. I thought he was going to unleash on a one [timer], and just slid it back door to me for a wide open net.
“And that's the kind of player Leno is. He's so smart, and he can score and he can pass, and he plays physical. He does everything, and he's got a really bright future.
Sourdif scored his three goals in a span of 11:34 of playing time across five shifts. He and McMichael each collected four points in a span of five shifts.
“I don’t think so,” responds McMichael, asked if he’d ever notched four points on five shifts before. “Maybe in like Tim Bits hockey back in Canada.”
Less than two minutes later, Ovechkin joined the scoring spree, taking a feed from Martin Fehervary and firing past the beleaguered Mrazek at 8:52, making it a 5-1 Washington lead, but with plenty of hockey yet to be played.
After Ryan Strome missed the net on Anaheim’s penalty shot, another longtime Caps killer – Alex Killorn – carved into Washington’s lead at 12:56. Just over a minute later, Trouba snuck a shot home from the right point, giving the Ducks a lot of life for the remainder of the game.
Leonard had a penalty shot late in the second; his backhander went off the post.
Mrazek was lifted in favor of Lukas Dostal to start the third, and the Ducks kept pouring the pressure on the Caps throughout the final frame; Lindgren faced 35 shots across the game’s final 40 minutes and the Ducks outshot the Caps 29-12 after Ovechkin’s goal made it 5-1.
Lindgren battled hard to make every save, but when Beckett Sennecke struck from the slot – his second goal in as many career games against the Caps – at 9:22 of the third, Washington’s margin for error had evaporated with more than half a period yet to play.
When Carlson lofted a 173-footer into the middle of the Anaheim net with 1:14 remaining, there was a collective exhale on the Caps’ bench and throughout the arena, and Lindgren celebrated emphatically, knowing his seventh win of the season was secure.
Ovechkin made sure with a 135-footer in the final minute, and Sourdif picked up his second assist and fifth point of the night in the process, joining defenseman Greg Theberge as just the second Washington rookie ever to enjoy a five-point night. Theberge had two goals and three assists in a 10-4 win over Philadelphia on Nov. 21, 1981, two weeks into the Bryan Murray era of Caps hockey.
Sourdif has been playing excellent hockey for the Caps for about two months now, and it was great to see him get rewarded on the scoresheet in such a big way.
“When we made that trade,” recalls Carbery of the June 2025 deal that brought Sourdif to the Caps from Florida, “there was a lot of like, ‘Justin Sourdif? A second-round pick? It doesn’t really add up. He’s played four games in the NHL.’
“There was a reason our organization had a lot of time for him as a player – how he looked, there wasn’t room [in the lineup] in Florida, he’s waiver eligible. He’s taken advantage of a great opportunity to come to a team like us, that has an injury, and he’s earned everything that he’s gotten.
“Sometimes, in Florida's situation and their circumstances with where they've been, what their roster looks like, it's an opportunity for us to add a really good young player that we believed in and thought could have the potential to be what he's doing right now. So, it's exciting for the organization.”
Sourdif may not have been on many people’s radar at the beginning of the season, or even at the beginning of the night. But anyone who watched his progression from opening night through the first half could see that he was capable of producing more offense than the five goals and 13 points he had accrued entering Monday’s match.
“Obviously, it's nice to get points,” he says. “I think the difficult thing is, when I had chances a few months ago, and maybe we ended up losing a game and I had two or three opportunities, I'm kind of beating myself up. I'm like, ‘I want to put them in the back of the net to help the team win.’
“But if the team's winning and I'm not necessarily scoring, I'm still happy; I'm doing anything I can to help the team win. And so in a game like tonight, I was pretty happy. Obviously, it was a tight game towards the end, and I was happy I was able to capitalize on those opportunities.”
