For the second time in as many road games – both of which were played in New Jersey against the Devils – the Caps roared out to a 3-0 lead on Friday night at Newark’s Prudential Center. As was the case back on Oct. 25 here, the Devils staged a furious rally, but this time the Caps never surrendered the lead, skating off with a 4-2 victory over their Metropolitan Division rivals.
Charlie Lindgren became the first Caps’ goalie to take a shutout into the third period this season, and he earned his second win with a sturdy 24-save performance.
“It was a gritty win tonight,” says Lindgren. “Going up 3-0, we knew they weren’t going to go away easy, and they certainly punched back in the third there. But being able to come out on top in their building, it’s a really good win for our guys.”
Friday’s victory secured the Caps a pair of points in the front end of a weekend set of back-to-backs against divisional rivals, but it did not come without a cost. Defenseman Martin Fehervary departed the game midway through the second period, and he did not return.
“It’s not ideal, so we’ll evaluate,” says Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery. “But we’ve got some issues on the back end.”
With Friday’s win, the Caps are now 5-1-1 in their last seven games.
Much of Washington’s top six forward group has gotten out to a low start this season, but with Nic Dowd back in the lineup for the first time since Oct. 16, the Caps’ newly cobbled fourth line stepped up early in Friday’s game against the Devils. In a span of eight-plus minutes in the back half of the opening period, the Caps got goals from each of their fourth-line flanks, and each of the wingers also drew a penalty, accounting for two of the team’s three power play opportunities in the first frame.
Recalled from AHL Hershey earlier in the day, Nicolas Aube-Kubel made his presence felt in the lineup almost immediately. Six seconds after stepping onto the ice for his third shift of the night, Aube-Kubel cranked up a clapper from the right circle that beat ex-Caps’ goalie Vitek Vanecek for a 1-0 Washington lead at 10:22 of the first. Rasmus Sandin and Sonny Milano had the helpers; the former carried into New Jersey ice while the latter made a sublime play from behind the Devils’ net, feeding Aube-Kubel perfectly.
On the very same shift mere seconds later, Aube-Kubel took a breakout feed from Martin Fehervary and sent Beck Malenstyn into New Jersey ice. From virtually the same spot from which Aube-Kubel just scored, Malenstyn took a wrist shot that clanked off the stick of a Devils’ defender, eluding Vanecek to push the Caps’ advantage to 2-0 at 10:37.
The Caps’ fourth line generated seven of the team’s 27 shots on net for the night, and for the first time in a dozen games this season, every member of the line skated at least a dozen minutes.
Having yielded goals on consecutive shots after stopping the first three shots he saw, Vanecek was given a quick hook, replaced by Akira Schmid.
“I felt like tonight we had sort of our natural – quote, unquote – fourth line,” says Carbery. “With Mal, a real identity, with Aube-Kubel and Dowd. And quite frankly, the way that potentially we saw it in a lot of different scenarios from the summer, of what our fourth line would look like. So credit to them.”
Washington wasn’t able to do anything with its three man-advantage opportunities in the first, but it limited New Jersey to just two shots on net in the opening stanza.
Early in the middle period, the Caps padded their lead with a hustle goal from their top trio. When an Alex Ovechkin clearing bid slowly wafted its way back into New Jersey ice, Tom Wilson and Evgeny Kuznetsov both got on their horses and outraced the Devils to the disc, effectively giving the Caps a short-ice two-on-none. The execution was excellent; Wilson fed Kuznetsov, and he buried it from the top of the paint to make it 3-0 at 6:34.
“I just saw that Tom was going to beat them for sure,” recounts Kuznetsov. “I was just trying to get open for him, to give him that option. And he passed it perfect; it was right on my tape.”
New Jersey started the third on a carryover power play, and the Caps killed that one off plus one more before the Devils were finally able to solve Lindgren, just before the middle of the third.
Timo Meier scored on a back door tap in at 7:13, just 13 seconds after the Devils won a draw in their own end. Some 20 seconds later, Lindgren flashed his right pad to deny Dawson Mercer at the opposite post, a save that loomed large minutes later when Meier hit Mercer for a tap in off the rush to make it a 3-2 game at 9:12 of the third.
“It was a quick play off the boards there,” says Lindgren of his stop on Mercer. “I think [Tyler] Toffoli was right there to try to hammer it home. Thank goodness I got to home base there, which is what I wanted to do, get back to the post, and thankfully kept that puck out.”
Unlike last month’s game here, when the Devils struck for four second-period goals to erase Washington’s early three-goal lead, the Caps and Lindgren shut the door the rest of the way, and Kuznetsov relieved the pressure with a long-distance empty-netter with 1:51 remaining.
“We knew what kind of team they were,” says Caps’ defenseman Nick Jensen. “We saw exactly what they did last time. They got down early, and then they push really hard. I know I was waiting for it, I know we were expecting it, so I wanted to stay on alert for it. They obviously did it then, and were able to put two in.
“But we stuck with it. It wasn’t a pretty win by any means. It was a lot of rimming, and chipping it out and dumping it in, but sometimes that’s what you’ve got to do to get a win.”
