Charlie Lindgren stopped all 31 shots he faced on Saturday night, blanking the New York Rangers in a 4-0 Washington win at Capital One Arena. Three of those 31 shots came off the stick of Lindgren’s brother Ryan, a Rangers’ defenseman. Saturday’s game marked the first time the two brothers had faced each other at the NHL level, and the two posed for a photo to commemorate the event minutes before the end of warmups.
“They’re obviously a really good team,” says Charlie Lindgren of the Rangers. “I think they have the best record in the NHL. You look at their lineup, and they’ve got a lot of skilled guys, a lot of guys that play hard. Right from puck drop tonight, first shift, I thought we really set the tone and everyone else followed. It was a really good team effort tonight.”
Charlie Lindgren was also appreciative of the opportunity to finally face his brother at the NHL level in this, his eighth professional season.
“It was really cool, and obviously really cool for my family,” he says. “Big thanks to them, to my parents, I obviously wouldn’t be here without them. But yeah, it was fun. Obviously we play them three more times this year, so I don’t want to get too high. But that’s a really good team over there, so every time we play against them, we’ve got to make sure that we’re ready.”
“It was cool,” says Ryan Lindgren of the experience. “He is someone I grew up admiring, and it’s a pretty special moment to get to play against him in the NHL. It meant a lot; I know it meant a lot to my parents and my family, so it’s something we won’t forget. Obviously, it’s tough that we lost, but it was really special.”
Washington played probably its most complete game of the season, grabbing the lead on the first shift of the game, then padding that advantage with a trio of tallies in the middle period. By night’s end, one skater from each of the Caps’ four forwards lines had a goal, Washington halted a three-game slide (0-2-1), and it handed New York – the top team in the League coming into the contest – its first pair of consecutive regulation losses this season.
A game after he was scratched in Thursday’s game against Dallas, Sonny Milano scored on the first shift of the game to stake Washington to a 1-0 lead. Seeing Martin Fehervary carrying the puck down the right side, Milano alertly backed from the slot to the weak side, took a feed from Fehervary and deposited it into a yawning cage for a 1-0 Caps’ lead just 43 seconds after opening puck drop.
“I thought that shift from [Evgeny Kuznetsov’s] line – Sonny Milano and T.J. Oshie – set the tone for our entire group,” says Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery. “Just right away from the puck pressure, good decisions, the execution with the puck that we’ve talked extensively about and had discussed earlier in the day. It just got us right into the right mindset for the entire group.”
Washington was able to nurse that slim lead to the first intermission, and it went to work on expanding that cushion early in the second period.
The Caps drew the game’s first power play late in the first, and although they didn’t score on the carryover man advantage, they doubled their lead just two ticks after the penalty expired. Anthony Mantha went to the New York net – where there were no white sweaters aside from that of goaltender Igor Shesterkin – accepted a pass from Kuznetsov, and he redirected it home to make it a 2-0 game at 1:43 of the second.
New York seemed to be on the verge of shifting momentum soon after the Mantha goal; the Rangers had the Caps playing mostly in their own end, and Washington hadn’t had a shot since the Mantha marker. But Tom Wilson made a good read to force a turnover high in Washington ice, and he tore down the left side on a 2-on-1 rush with Alex Ovechkin riding shotgun. Wilson called his own number, beating Shesterkin high to the glove side from the top of the left circle at 5:35.
The Rangers put some heat on Washington both early and late in the middle frame, but the Caps were able to handle it by keeping New York’s skilled forwards to the perimeter, for the most part.
“Give them credit, especially those top two lines,” says Carbery of the Rangers. “They stress you, and we did a really good job. We were defending quite a bit, but I felt like we defended the right area, protected the inside, and forced everything to the [outside].”
Just over six minutes later, the Caps struck again, netting their third goal of the frame on the forecheck. Washington’s fourth line cobbled this one together after winning a draw in its own end, getting the puck deep and getting in on the forecheck. Beck Malenstyn hustled in to negate an icing call, and after the puck pinballed around behind the New York net, Malenstyn swept it to the front, where Nicolas Aube-Kubel had the time and space needed to whip a shot to the twine, making it 4-0 at 11:52, some 17 seconds after Nic Dowd won that draw in Washington ice.
“We’ve been talking for a few games, that the F3 [third forward in on forecheck] should not get too close to the two forecheck guys, and try to give them more of that slot option,” explains Aube-Kubel. “If it was a pass or just a puck rebound, I don’t know. I was just in a good place at a good time.”
The rest of the night involved Lindgren and whether he would be able to usher his fourth career shutout – second of the season – to the buzzer. His glove was solid all night, and most shots stuck to him like Velcro. His teammates in front of him also let him see pucks, and they defended diligently and firmly all night long.
“Just being able to see the puck, and that’s a great credit to the guys in front of me,” says the Washington goaltender. “I think our [defense] did a really good job tonight; I had a lot of good sightlines, and I was able to get my body in front of a lot of pucks, and I was able to see a lot of pucks.”
Facing the team he coached for the last three seasons for the first time since he and the Caps parted ways this past April, Rangers' coach Peter Laviolette was understandably less than pleased with Saturday’s game.
“It was not good, from the start to the finish,” says Laviolette. “No sense dissecting it here, publicly. We’ve got a game [Sunday] night, and we’ll need to be a lot better.”
The Caps will see the Rangers three more times between now and mid-January.
“They’re a benchmark team in the League right now, and we knew we would have to be ready,” says Wilson. “They play fast, they have a lot of skill, a good, balanced lineup. We set the tone from the first shift with Kuzy’s line, and rolled from there.”
