Charlie Lindgren stopped all 35 shots he faced on Tuesday night, recording his first shutout as a Capital and the third of his NHL career in a 3-0 victory over the Vegas Golden Knights – the defending Stanley Cup champs – at Capital One Arena. The final score doesn’t do Lindgren’s performance justice; the Caps struck for their last two goals in the final minute of the contest. Lindgren made Dylan Strome’s first-period marker stand up for more than 40 minutes.
Lindgren’s whitewash of the Golden Knights was his first in the NHL in over five years, and he didn’t even get the win the last time he blanked the opposition, which was Feb. 26, 2018, against the Flyers in Montreal, when he was a member of the Canadiens.
“It’s been a while since my last one,” says Lindgren. “I remember it was against Phillly, I lost in a shootout, 1-0. It’s been a long time coming.
“But yeah, tonight, straight from puck drop, I felt in the zone. I think I’ve got some really good momentum going right now. I feel good in practice, and I’m feeling good in games. I thought our guys were good again tonight; they did a lot of selling out and blocking shots, coming up big in big moments. It’s a big two points.”
Once again, Lindgren had plenty of help from a battling bunch of Caps skaters who combined to block 19 shots in front of him. The Caps are fourth in the NHL with 18.33 blocked shots/per 60 minutes of play.
“He was the win,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery of Lindgren. “Just fantastic all night. Go down the list of the breakaways, all the saves in tight, the screens and the tips, and rebounds – he had it all – pass outs on their forecheck; they go right to [their third forward in the zone]. They must have had three or four of those, so all sorts of different stops. [He’s] the difference in the game.”
Opening a five-game road trip, Vegas suffered just its third regulation loss in 16 games this season, but each of the three has come in the Golden Knights’ last four games.
“Well, he certainly made some timely saves,” says Vegas coach Bruce Cassidy. “I can’t sit here and say we didn’t generate some good looks. We had at least four or five breakaways. But then you go past that, and he’s playing well and the ones he’s seeing, he’s stopping. So there’s a little bit of, ‘Can we generate more second chances?’ It’s a 1-0 game in the third, and I thought we had a few looks then.”
With the defending champs in town and with Washington’s defense depleted, the Caps knew they’d be in for a handful on Tuesday night. Their start was a bit wobbly, but Lindgren was at the peak of his game in the first frame, stopping all 14 shots sent in his direction.
Among the top stops were a trio of Mark Stone opportunities from in tight, three of the eight shots Vegas put on Lindgren from inside of 20 feet away in the first. Lindgren also turned aside breakaway bids from Ivan Barbashev and William Karlsson, also thwarting the former’s follow-up bid.
Once Washington found its footing, it scored the game’s first goal for the fifth straight contest.
High in Washington’s end of the ice, Sonny Milano put a stop to a Vegas sequence in the offensive zone by being first to a loose puck. With a nifty indirect feed, Milano then sent Strome into Vegas ice on a 2-on-1 with Matthew Phillips riding shotgun. Strome called his own number, firing a shot to the top right corner of the cage from the inside of the left circle, staking the Caps to a 1-0 lead at 16:39 of the opening frame.
“I had a couple of good chances early on,” recounts Strome, “one on the power play, and then one on a backhander from the slot. I was looking for Philly the whole way, and I had a really similar play a few games ago, where I ended up passing to [Alex Ovechkin] at the end of my first shift, and it got picked off.
“[Tonight], I felt like the [defenseman] was sitting back a little bit, and the goalie was pretty deep in his net. I just saw the right side and put home. Big goal.”
Indeed, it was. Strome’s seventh goal of the season is the game-winner; he is the sixth different Capital to author the game-winning goal this season; the Caps also won a pair of games in the shootout.
Also in the first, Caps’ defenseman Dylan McIlrath – seeing his first NHL action of the season – put a sturdy hit on Knights’ winger Jonas Rondbjerg, which led to the big blueliner dropping mitts with Vegas’ Keegan Kolesar.
Washington wasn’t able to do much with a pair of first-period power play opportunities, but the Caps got a golden opportunity with the extra man just over five minutes into the second. Vegas winger Paul Cotter – who took a minor penalty in the offensive zone in the first – was assessed a match penalty for another offensive zone violation, this one a hit to the head of Caps’ center Evgeny Kuznetsov.
The Caps needed Lindgren to make an arm save on another Karlsson breakaway early in the five-minute major, but they eventually managed to test Vegas goalkeeper Logan Thompson, most notably on a Connor McMichael rush chance from the slot.
Washington killed off a Vegas power play just after the midpoint of the middle period, and the Caps quelled a pair of dangerous situations late in the frame to nurse their 1-0 lead into the third. With just over three minutes remaining, Lucas Johansen deftly broke up a developing 3-on-1 rush by batting a saucer pass out of midair and out of harm’s way. A minute or so after that, Lindgren denied Michael Amadio from the slot off the rush.
Washington killed off another Vegas power play in the third, extending its streak of consecutive kills to 20.
The Caps spent far more time defending than they would have liked, and the Golden Knights won 38 of the game’s 55 face-offs (69%). In the third, the Caps won only three of 17 face-offs and weren’t able to mount much in the way of a sustained attack of their own, so Connor McMichael’s empty-net strike with 48.1 seconds remaining was a massive goal for Washington.
Sixteen seconds later, Beck Malenstyn extended his point streak to three games (two goals, one assist) with a breakaway goal at 19:27 of the third. Washington has now managed to score three or more goals in four straight games (3-0-1) for the first time this season. Perhaps more importantly, the Caps have limited the opposition to two or fewer goals in six of their last eight games.
Despite the victory over the defending champs, the Caps are under no illusions. They’re happy to be finding ways to win, but they also realize that they can and must be better at some aspects of their game as well.
“It’s hard to be critical in these moments,” says Carbery. “We’ll go back and digest the film, and we’ll get to work on all the things that we need to do a better job of; we will get to work, and we will put that in.
“But to find ways to win, good teams do that. And that's what we continue to do against a really good team that is arguably the most experienced at coming back, winning games, tight game, and we find a way to win. Who's better than the Stanley Cup champions, right? [They] just played in two months of those type of games, so our guys deserve a lot of credit for finding a way to grind out [a win], and Chucky obviously deserves a lot of credit, [as does] the penalty kill.”
