There is a long-held NHL adage that the team that takes advantage of a 5-on-3 power play or can snuff out a lengthy two-man advantage for the opposition is usually the one that wins the hockey game. The Capitals turned that adage on its ear Wednesday night in Vancouver.
Washington jumped out to an early 2-0 lead in the first by converting on both ends of a two-man advantage, and it successfully killed off an even longer Vancouver 5-on-3 early in the second period. But it wasn’t enough to put the Caps in the win column; Vancouver ended a franchise-record 11-game slide (0-9-2) with a 4-3 victory over Washington at Rogers Arena.
The Canucks had been without a win in calendar 2026, and they had led on the scoreboard for just over 36 minutes total in the 10 games they had played in the new year. But Vancover rallied for the game’s next four goals after the Caps’ took that early lead, and the Canucks led for the final 30-plus minutes of the contest. Washington’s late effort to close a two-goal deficit fell one puck shy.
Washington has now dropped four consecutive games in regulation for the first time in Spencer Carbery’s three seasons behind the bench.
“At the end of the day, we're just making too many big mistakes,” says Carbery. “I sound like a broken record, but that's just the reality of it. We're making massive, massive mistakes, and it's throughout. You just can't in this league – it's just too competitive – you just cannot give free goals, and that's what we're doing too much.”
For Washington, the front half of the first frame was golden, and the back half was not so much so. The Caps drew a pair of early overlapping penalty calls on the Canucks, resulting in 69 seconds worth of a two-man advantage. The Caps’ power play has recently come alive, and that unit staked the team to an early two-goal lead by cashing in on both ends of the 5-on-3.
From up top, John Carlson fed Tom Wilson down low on the left side, and Wilson quickly bumped it across to Dylan Strome for an easy layup and a 1-0 Washington lead at 8:25.
With the second power play unit on the ice, the Capitals went right back to work. From the left half wall, Alex Ovechkin started the scoring play with a feed to Strome at the bottom of the circle on the weak side. Strome then bumped it to local product Justin Sourdif, who tapped it home from the top of the paint for a 2-0 lead at 9:43.
Vancouver cut into the Caps’ cushion at 13:32 with a forecheck goal. David Kampf got below the goal line and threaded a feed to the front for Brock Boeser, who picked the top right corner of the cage to make it a 2-1 game.
After the Caps failed to go 3-for-3 on the power play, the Canucks drew even with just 1:38 remaining in the first, doing so just 10 seconds after Washington won a draw in its own end but didn’t exit its zone cleanly. Evander Kane came into possession of the puck below the goal line and curled outside of the right post, putting a bad angle shot to the front. The puck bounded off the skate blade of Caps defenseman Matt Roy and into the net, squaring the score at 2-2.
Things went further in a southerly direction for the Caps in the middle stanza. First, the Caps fell into some penalty soup, and they needed a couple of Nic Dowd face-off wins and subsequent clears to escape a Vancouver 5-on-3 advantage of 74 seconds in duration early in the period.
But less than three minutes later, the Canucks jumped in front.
Again, it was Kampf getting in on the forecheck and making a play to the front for Drew O’Connor, who fired a shot past Logan Thompson on the stick side at 8:58.
Less than three minutes later, with the two teams playing 4-on-4 hockey, the Canucks added to their lead when blueliner Filip Hronek jumped up in the play on a 2-on-1 rush and converted a Jake DeBrusk feed to make it a 4-2 game at 11:43.
“It seems like a tough league to hold a lead,” says Wilson, who returned to the lineup after an eight-game absence because of a lower body injury. “I think maybe you take the foot off the pedal for a minute, and they jump. They got a couple bounces, and they jump right back in it. So those first two [goals] for them, it's frustrating. There's not a ton we can do; the guy {Kampf] whacks [Rasmus Sandin] pretty good and creates a turnover. And then they get a weird bounce.
“So after that, we’ve got to do a better job at kind of flipping the momentum back and getting back to work. But think the effort is there, we’ve just got to probably play a little more aggressive, take their time and space. They were hounding the puck a little bit better than us tonight.”
In the third, the Caps were only able to get a goal closer when Strome struck again in a 6-on-5 situation at the goalmouth with Thompson pulled for an extra attacker. Strome’s second goal of the night came with 3:23 still on the clock, but the Caps couldn’t muster the equalizer.
“It's a tough way that that game goes down,” says Carbery, “just with building the lead early, and then we give it back in the last seven minutes of the first period, make a few mistakes, but I still feel like we're all right, being we're to back to square one to start the second period.
“And even the second I didn't think was terrible. We just made a few mistakes, and then it ends up in the back of our net. We couldn’t capitalize. We probably needed one in the second period to keep that at one.”
