As they seek some upward mobility in the standings late in the first quarter of the season, the Capitals have encountered a veritable murderer’s row of a schedule of late. Their recent four-game road trip concluded with games in Tampa, Carolina and Florida, three of the League’s elite teams for years now. Coming home for a three-game homestand, the scheduled served them a couple of division leaders in New Jersey and Los Angeles, and Edmonton – a Stanley Cup finalist each of the last two seasons – looms next.
Los Angeles rode into town as a “road hot” team on Monday night; the Kings were seeking to stretch their road point streak to 11 here tonight against the Caps, which would have matched a franchise mark. Los Angeles entered at 8-0-2 in its previous 10 road games.
As Nigel Tufnel himself will tell you, this one did not go to eleven.
Behind a typically gritty and gutty goaltending performance by Charlie Lindgren and the heating up hockey sticks of Connor McMichael and Alex Ovechkin, the Caps eked out a 2-1 win over their guests, a much-needed victory that also turned the odometer over to triple digits for Caps coach Spencer Carbery. He logged his 100th victory as an NHL coach with Monday’s win over Los Angeles
“It’s pretty humbling just to be able to coach in the National Hockey League and coach this great organization,” says Carbery. “For my family and I to think about – the guys brought it up; two years and 19 games – it’s flown by, but we’ve had the time of our lives, and I just count my lucky stars every day.”
In Saturday’s homestand opener against New Jersey, a sloppy start ended up impacting the Caps; they took three penalties in the first seven minutes of the game, and a Devils power-play goal put them in an early hole in what became a 3-2 shootout loss.
To a man, the Caps looked determined to atone for Saturday’s start, and they did so with a strong first frame at both ends. Washington created several good scoring chances and looks at the LA net in the first, its power play looked good, and Lindgren was sharp in net.
Even better, the Caps scored the game’s first goal early against one of the League’s stingiest defensive outfits.
The opening salvo was a bit unorthodox and a case of trading places; left winger Aliaksei Protas fired a shot from the left point while former Kings blueliner Matt Roy stood strangely alone and unmarked in the slot. Roy deftly deflected the Protas drive through to the back of the net, lifting the Caps to a 1-0 lead at 3:41.
“We talked about getting more bodies to the net,” says Roy. “I was just down in the play, kind of hunting, and Pro was covering for me, and it just kind of worked out that way. It’s a good heads up play by him.”
Early in the second period, the Caps doubled their lead on Ovechkin’s 903rd career goal. McMichael got to a loose puck behind the Los Angeles net, and he spotted the captain with time and space just off the left post. McMichael put it on Ovechkin’s tape, and he whipped a shot past ex-teammate Darcy Kuemper to the far side, giving the Caps a 2-0 cushion at 1:51.
McMichael now has three points in his last two games while Ovechkin has scored in three consecutive home games and has eight points (four goals, for assists) in the Caps’ last seven games; he leads the team in scoring over that span.
In the back half of the middle period, the Kings cut into the Capitals’ lead on a Los Angeles power play. Two ancient Kings combined on the strike; from the right half wall, Corey Perry threw a feed right on the tape of Anze Kopitar, who redirected it into the net to make it a 2-1 contest at 13:27.
Kopitar, who has already announced this will be his last season in the NHL, was cheered by the crowd earlier in the game when the Caps’ game ops department paid the venerable 21-year veteran a short tribute on the video board.
Although that was it for the scoring in the game, both sides generated several chances the rest of the way, and both goalies had answers for everything sent in their direction.
The Kings made life difficult Washington in its own end of the ice for the last half of the game; every exit was an ordeal for the Caps, who too often merely dumped it out to neutral ice and awaited the next entry from LA.
Lindgren made one of his best stops on a Los Angeles power play in the third period, gloving down a howitzer of a one-timer off the stick of Quinton Byfield to preserve the thinnest of margins.
Monday was Lindgren’s sixth start of the season; four of the first five came in the back half of back-to-back games, the other was a 12:30 pm start at home last month. But Lindgren wouldn’t use the timing of his starts as an excuse.
“You never want to make excuses,” says Lindgren. “I mean, is it better? Are games better when you're not getting in at two, three [o’clock] in the morning? Probably, yeah. But still, the games that I've played so far, it's the NHL and you get up for those games no matter what.
“I’m definitely not going to make any excuses. And when I get the chance to get in there, even if it is a back-to-back – we’ve got a back-to-back coming up here – no excuses. I’ll go in there and work as hard as I can.”
Lindgren’s 30-save victory over the Kings is his 60th victory as a Capital, moving him past Michal Neuvirth and into ninth place on Washington’s all-time wins ledger.
The Kings finish a six-game road trip on Thursday in San Jose, and Monday’s defeat in DC is the lone blemish on the trip to date.
“The first period was the difference in the game; it was clear,” says Los Angeles coach Jim Hiller. “We had lots of energy in the second and third, so there’s no reason why we didn’t start with the same energy. We made some mistakes. Anyway, we got what we deserved.”
As did the Capitals. They could have played better over the last 30 or 40 minutes, but they kept the Kings at arm’s length even when Los Angeles was lengthening some of its offensive zone shifts late in the contest.
“You could tell we’re looking for good things to happen, not only as a team, but individually,” says Carbery, whose team was 2-6-2 in its last 10 games entering Monday’s tilt. “When you’re searching for that – anything positive – winning a game like this, it just builds. It builds momentum for us, it builds confidence, and that’s really, really important.
“You can tell it wasn’t pretty in the second half of that game. We had to fight, scratch and claw and grind that out. And we probably did some things that were uncharacteristic of what we would like it to look like, but that’s’ what happens when you’re trying to find how we’re going to close out games.
“Glad to see the guys fight and earn that two points tonight [for] Chucky, and I think that’s the big thing. Those guys love him. They just care so much about Chucky, and as hard as it is for Chucky when he’s in games and we’re not playing well in front of him, the guys feel that too and they take that to heart.”
