The Two That Got Away

Standings points earned in November count the same as standings points earned in March in the NHL, and the same holds true for points not earned, of course. The Caps mismanaged a late lead on Thursday in Montreal, surrendering three goals in the last 184 seconds and squandering a pair of points in a 6-4 setback at the hands of the Habs.

Down 3-1 in the second period, the Caps rallied for three unanswered goals to take a 4-3 lead into the third. They nursed that advantage into the latter stages of the game, but couldn't close the deal.

Dmitry Orlov was stripped of the puck behind the Washington net, and Jesperi Kotkaniemi slipped it through Caps goalie Braden Holtby with 3:04 left to tie the game at 4-4. In the final half-minute of regulation, Montreal's Max Domi put a shot off Holtby's catching glove and into the net, lifting the Habs to a 5-4 lead with 21.1 seconds left. Joel Armia added to the red light parade with an empty-netter two seconds later.
"I thought I read right where it went," says Holtby of Domi's late game-winner. "I don't know if it nicked off [John Carlson's] stick or not; I'll have to watch the replay again. I thought I read it perfectly. It just hit the top cuff of my glove and it bent it over. It's one we'll have to look at and see what happened."
The Caps weren't good enough early in the first and second periods, and they certainly weren't good enough late in the third, continuing an early-season pattern of letting down and/or melting down in the early or latter stages of periods.
"Those are critical moments to winning hockey," says Caps coach Todd Reirden. "I've spoken for the first 10 or 11 games about putting together a 60-minute game and again it comes back to haunt us. We get ourselves back in the game after being behind against a team that's really good with the lead here. And we're in control of the game and then we mismanage the puck four times in the last seven or eight minutes and just give them transition offense.
"We've got to continue to learn, and we're learning some lessons the hard way now."

The Caps took a few minutes to find their legs at the start, and Montreal took advantage of it to grab an early 1-0 lead. Washington got caught with too many guys on the wrong side of the puck in the offensive zone, and Kotkaniemi broke the puck out of the Montreal end, starting a three-on-two rush. After taking a feed from Armia, Kotkaniemi netted the first goal of his NHL career, snapping a shot behind Holtby at 2:28 of the first.
Washington answered a few minutes later when Lars Eller scored against his former Montreal teammates, putting back a rebound of a Matt Niskanen shot to make it a 1-1 game at 6:16 of the first.
Montreal regained its lead in the first minute of the second when Brendan Gallagher converted a Tomas Tatar feed just 32 seconds into the middle frame. On their very next shift, Tatar set up Gallagher again, this time the latter pulling the puck off the back wall and stuffing it behind Holtby on the short side for a 3-1 Montreal lead at 3:06 of the second.
For the third time in as many shifts, Gallagher's line was on for a lamplighter, but the third one was a Washington goal. Montreal turned the puck over in neutral ice, and all five Caps on the ice had possession of the puck at some point in a span of six or seven seconds, culminating with Alex Ovechkin finishing an Evgeny Kuznetsov backhand feed to make it a 3-2 game at 6:49.
Seventy seconds later, Brett Connolly won a board battle behind the Montreal net and managed to roll the puck to the front for Eller, who cranked a one-timer from the slot behind Habs goalie Carey Price to square the score at 3-3.
Less than five minutes later, the Caps took their first lead of the evening on Ovechkin's second goal of the game. On a sustained offensive zone shift, Niskanen lunged to push the puck from the slot to partner Dmitry Orlov up high in the zone. Orlov floated it back toward the net, and it caught Ovechkin about shoulder high and bounded into the cage, putting the Caps up 4-3 at 12:53 of the second.
The Caps managed to expertly kill off a Montreal power play at the start of the third, getting good pressure up ice and some scoring chances of their own in the process. Montreal started to turn up the heat around the middle of the third, and it took a great Holtby save on Domi with about 12 minutes left to preserve the 4-3 lead, albeit temporarily.

Washington had its only power play opportunity of the game with 6:59 remaining, a chance to add an insurance tally with its top-ranked extra-man unit. But the Caps weren't able to muster as much as a shot on goal during those two minutes, and Kotkaniemi delivered the tying tally less than two minutes after the Canadiens completed the kill.
Seconds before Domi's goal, he stripped Ovechkin of the puck in the slot in front of the Montreal net. The Caps' captain was visibly upset that a penalty was not called on the play. Regardless of that call, this was a game where the Caps simply weren't as buttoned down as they needed to be when it mattered the most.
"It's a one-goal game," says Eller, speaking of the last few minutes of the game. "You expect them to put some pressure on. I think it was, for us, overall, not just the last three minutes but a lot of uncharacteristic mistakes for us - turnovers on the offensive blueline and not executing passes in our own zone. We got stuck either not executing the pass or fumbling the puck. It's pretty uncharacteristic for us. There was a lot of that today, so it was a weird game. That's not usually how we play."