For the first time this season, the Caps are winners in a shootout. Dylan Strome scored the only goal of the skills competition on Monday night at Capital One Arena and Logan Thompson shut down all three Ottawa attempts, enabling the Caps to come away with a 5-4 victory in the finale of a five-game homestand, Washington’s longest of the season.
Most importantly, Monday’s win puts Washington back in the win column, halting the team’s first three-game slide of the season.
Monday’s win wasn’t pretty by any means; the Caps were able to play with a lead for the first time in more than a week, but they lost hold of a 3-0 second-period lead and leads of 3-1 and 4-3 in the third. The Caps faced down seven Ottawa power plays – including a self-inflicted one on a bench minor for too many men on the ice in overtime – and Thompson saw more than half of his workload while the Sens enjoyed the man advantage.
“There was a little bit of everything tonight,” says Caps winger Tom Wilson. “Probably good entertainment for the fans, but not the one you want structure wise from our end. But [we’re] a resilient group; we just found a way to get it done on home ice.”
Ottawa put 37 shots on Thompson, and the Sens scored two power-play goals on 20 shots with the extra man.
Offensively, Wilson recorded a Gordie Howe hat trick, P-L Dubois had a three-point night (one goal, two assists) and Martin Fehervary chipped in with a big third-period goal and an assist.
“We’ll certainly take the win, because we’ve been reeling a little bit at home here,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “But it didn’t look good out there, didn’t feel good at any point of the game. So we’ll look at a few things, but we’ll take the two points.”
Connor McMichael started the scoring at 1:41 of the first, tapping home a loose puck on a goalmouth scramble. Ottawa opted to issue a coach’s challenge on the goal, alleging that McMichael had interfered with Linus Ullmark, preventing him from being able to make the stop. The officials saw it differently; the goal counted and the Caps went on the power play.
“We talked about it before the game,” says McMichael. “Especially with how we’ve been playing lately, we wanted to have a good start and get on them early, and just create chances, especially at the net front, a couple of greasy ones like that.
“I was fortunate it was sitting there, and I whiffed on it a few times, but I got a little lucky.”
That early man advantage soon morphed into 4-on-4 hockey, and that’s when Dubois converted a McMichael feed from the slot at 3:34, doubling the Caps’ lead to 2-0.
In the final minute of the first, Wilson dropped mitts with Ottawa’s Brady Tkachuk. The scrap was just the third of the season for Wilson, and his first since Nov. 18.
The Sens came out of the gates with some jump in the middle frame, pumping nine shots on Thompson in the first six minutes of the second. But when Ottawa was busted for having too many men on the ice, the Caps pushed their lead to 3-0 on Wilson’s power-play goal at 6:53 of the middle period. From the high slot, Wilson converted a Dubois feed from the goal line to make it 3-0.
In the back half of the second, Ottawa came 200 feet to get on the board. Shane Pinto converted a Jake Sanderson feed on a short-ice 2-on-1 that came at 12:18 of the second period, just 13 seconds after the Sens won a draw in their own end of the ice.
On a carryover power play that stretched into the opening portion of the third period, Claude Giroux pulled Ottawa to within one when he slipped a left circle one-timer past Thompson on the short side at 1:05 to make it a 3-2 game.
Pinto’s second goal of the game squared the score at 3-3; the Ottawa center again drove the net as he did on his first goal, but he got credit for the tying tally at 8:01 when Lars Eller inadvertently deflected the puck past Thompson.
Battling for its first playoff berth since 2016-17, Ottawa had a golden opportunity to take its first lead of the night when it went on the power play for the fifth time, midway through the third. Not only did the Caps successfully snuff out that power play without incident, they regained the lead when Wilson filled out the Gordie Howe hatty by setting up Fehervary – the late guy into the zone – for a rip from the slot. Fehervary’s shot beat Ullmark on the glove side, putting the Caps up 4-3 at 12:43.
“I had a great opportunity in the second period, and I could have scored that one,” recounts Fehervary. “I was obviously a little bit mad.
“I tried to rip it, and it went in. Obviously, I’m really happy for that. And a great play by Willy.”
Late in the third, Dubois was boxed for putting the puck over the glass, putting the Caps in a 4-on-6 situation with Ullmark off for an extra attacker. Tkachuk scored on a rebound at 18:52, and Ottawa’s second power-play goal of the game forced overtime between these two teams for the third time in as many games this season.
Washington had the puck for most of the first couple minutes of overtime, right up until it was deemed guilty of having too many men on the ice during 3-on-3 overtime, its League-leading 12th bench minor of the season.
Thanks to a trio of stops from Thompson on that power play – two of them on Drake Batherson – the Caps survived for the shootout.
Thompson denied all three Ottawa shots, snaring Batherson’s backhander with his glove at the last second on the first of those attempts. Strome patiently waited out Ullmark before casually lifting a backhander over him and in, and Thompson shut down Giroux to seal the victory.
“It was a good game, good team,” says Sens coach Travis Green. “Obviously we don’t like getting down 3-0, but we showed a lot of character coming back. And anytime you lose in the shootout, you lost the shootout.”
This is true, but the Caps didn’t lose in the shootout for the first time in four tries this season, all of them since the calendar flipped to 2025. Monday’s win was the Caps’ first in the shootout since they prevailed 7-6 over Carolina here in DC on March 22 of last year, a game in which Sonny Milano had a hat trick.
“It was good,” says Thompson of the team’s first shootout triumph in nearly a year. “I feel like we’ve all – as a group – been fighting it lately. Just happy to get the two points and build from there.”
