Washington’s bottom six showed up on the scoresheet and its power play struck for the fourth time in as many games, and that was more than enough to send the Seattle Kraken to a 4-1 defeat on Tuesday night at Capital One Arena. Tuesday’s victory allows the Caps to finish their four-game homestand with a 3-1-0 mark.
Coming off a 4-3 loss to Vancouver on Saturday, the Caps came out and played an extremely solid first 40 minutes in all three zones before Seattle was able to summon some energy in the third period, by which time the Caps had built a multi-goal cushion.
“For the most part, that’s how we want to play every night,” says Caps defenseman Jakob Chychrun. “It’s going to be hard to do that for 82 games, but as often as we can, that’s the way we want to play, and to have good starts. We were happy with the effort tonight for sure.”
After the Caps’ previous win over Minnesota on Friday, coach Spencer Carbery remarked on how the Nic Dowd line does such yeoman work on a nightly basis, but it isn’t always rewarded on the scoresheet.
Tonight, that line manufactured the game’s first goal, and it was no grunt goal; it was a beauty.
Playing in his 300th career NHL game, Brandon Duhaime sparked the scoring play that broke the seal on the scoresheet. Duhaime carried into Seattle ice, and upon reaching the right wing half wall, he spun off a defender and put the puck to the slot for John Carlson who immediately put it on Nic Dowd’s tape as the latter drove the net from the right side. All Dowd had to do was make sure the pass hit his stick, which it did, and it went directly behind Matt Murray. The tic-tac-toe tally gave Washington a 1-0 lead at 8:30 of the first.
“I was just reading where the guy is,” recounts Carlson. “Whoever was going to the net there too [Ethen Frank], the goalie had no chance of seeing me if I decided to shoot it or pass it.”
The Caps were in the offensive zone more than they were in their own end in the first, and they generated some other good opportunities as well. The most noteworthy of those was Ryan Leonard’s rocket off the pipe; he expertly changed the shooting angle with a defenseman right on him and still squeezed it off with max velocity.
Logan Thompson’s best stop of the first frame came in the back half of the period when he shrugged off a John Hayden shot from in tight with a shoulder save.
Leonard was heard from again in the first minute of the second period, and this time there was no iron involved. Going deep into Seattle ice on the forecheck, Aliaksei Protas used his boardinghouse reach to poke the puck to a vacant area in the high slot, and from there Leonard collected and fired it past Murray at the 25-second mark of the middle frame.
“It’s just a quick transition play up the middle,” says Leonard. “I passed it up to Pro, and it was a busted pass. And then he chased it down pretty good, and he used that long reach to his advantage, and he got it to me in the slot.”
Less than half a minute later, the Caps went on the power play for the first time in the game, and they quickly padded their lead. Dylan Strome won a left dot draw, and Alex Ovechkin sent it cross ice for Chychrun, who slung a shot past Murray on the short side at 1:28 of the middle period, a mere five seconds after the face-off, and just 63 ticks after the Leonard goal.
“Just a lot of room,” says Chychrun, asked what he saw on the play. “Just walk in and try to score, pretty much.”
The Caps had the Kraken hemmed into their end for a lengthy sequence in the middle of the period, and Seattle turned the tables a bit later on in the frame. But the Caps were able to outchange the Kraken a couple of times and to pump some pucks on Murray, while the Kraken were kept largely on the perimeter and didn’t get much in the way of scoring opportunities from their zone time.
“We had those two shifts against, but I felt like we had a significant amount of shifts for, that we have to have,” says Carbery. “Any time you draw up a game plan, if you can do that and impose those shifts on your opposition -- whatever the final tally was; maybe we had 10 of those and they had two or three – that's a good night.
“First two periods I really liked. I liked our start a lot. I challenged our group a little bit, and the guys knew, just based on what went on on Sunday [in the loss to Vancouver], that we wanted to have a better start. It was a little bit sloppy at times, but first period was good, the second was even better.”
Washington held Seattle without a shot on net for more than 15 minutes of playing time, from the back half of the first to just ahead of the midpoint of the middle stanza.
Through 40 minutes of play the Caps limited Seattle to just nine shots on net, and Washington owned an 11-1 bulge in high danger scoring chances – according to naturalstattrick.com – at 5-on-5. But Seattle broke through early in the third, seconds after failing to cash in on its first power play of the contest.
Parked near the paint on the right side, Jaden Schwartz got a favorable bounce on a left point drive from Ben Meyers that bounded off the glass and came right to him. Schwartz quickly buried it at 3:50 of the third.
While the Kraken was able to generate more zone time in the third, Thompson and the Caps defense combined to keep the door closed. Tom Wilson’s empty-net goal in the game’s final minute sent Seattle to its second setback in as many nights, and the Kraken now heads to Winnipeg, where it will conclude a six-game road run on Thursday night against the Jets.
“I thought we made more plays in the third period,” says Kraken coach Lane Lambert. “We had times where we inflicted pain on ourselves by turning pucks over and not making plays quick enough – certainly early on in the game – and you can’t do that. We have to be better. But in the third period, we probably made more plays and I thought we had a pretty good push in the third period.”
