Tuesday night against Montreal, the Caps entered the third period looking up at a two-goal deficit, but they rallied for a stirring comeback victory on a couple of Ethen Frank goals in the third period and Connor McMichael’s overtime game-winner. With the San Jose Sharks in town for the middle match of a three-game homestand on Thursday at Capital One Arena, the Caps tried but failed to affect the same outcome in the same situation.
The Sharks struck for three goals on four shots in a span of 2 minutes and 46 seconds of the third period – all of them from less than 10 feet from the net – to erase what was a brief 1-0 Washington lead, and San Jose skated away with a 3-2 victory. For the Capitals, it marked the eighth straight time they’ve failed to follow up a victory with another one in their next game (0-6-2).
“Not even close enough for the first 40 minutes,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “I could dive into a bunch of the X’s and O’s and reasons why, and that’s what we’ll get to work on."
After Anthony Beauvillier narrowly missed giving Washington a 1-0 lead with a couple of quick early opportunities from inside of 10 feet away, the Caps went dry in the offensive zone for the better part of the first half of the game. Washington had three shots on net in the game’s first minute, and only two over the rest of the initial period, both of them from distance.
Logan Thompson made a key stop on Alexander Wennberg off the rush early in the period, the only shot the Sharks could muster for the game’s first dozen minutes.
Right around the 13-minute mark, Thompson shut down a brief fusillade of shots – two Macklin Celebrini shots sandwiched around Collin Graf’s try on the rebound of the first one – to keep the game scoreless.
San Jose had the game’s first power play late in the first, and Thompson literally shrugged off a high Celebrini drive that had some zip on it. It was the only shot San Jose managed on the man advantage.
When Dylan Strome finally put a shot on the San Jose net just after the six-minute mark of the second period, it ended a run of 15 straight shots on net for the Sharks and halted a drought of over 14 minutes without a shot on net from Washington. Strome’s shot was also the first by a Caps forward in 25 minutes and 22 seconds of playing time.
Just under five minutes later, Strome lifted the Caps to a 1-0 lead on the power play. After Alex Ovechkin’s shot missed the net wide, Strome was in the right spot for a favorable bounce off the back wall, and he backhanded it home from just off the right pipe, putting the Caps up 1-0 at 10:58.
That would prove to be the high-water mark for Washington on Thursday night. It would be more than eight minutes before the Caps would register their next shot on net, and by then, they were looking up at a 3-1 deficit.
Old friend Dmitry Orlov carried the puck from behind his own net to the Washington line and dumped it in. Orlov also arrived first on the forecheck, and he dished it to the front where Zack Ostapchuk was all alone at the top of the paint. Ostapchuk roofed a shot to square the score at 1-1 at 13:27.
Soon afterwards, San Jose’s Pavol Regenda blunted Strome’s attempt at a cross-ice pass just outside the Washington line. Regenda then gathered the puck and put it to the front where Graf deftly redirected it over Thompson for a 2-1 lead at 14:53.
Just over a minute later, the Caps were unable to wrangle the puck away from Celebrini behind their own net, and the splendid sophomore issued a blind feed to the front for Regenda, who quickly put it under the bar for the Sharks’ third goal in less than three minutes, all from essentially the top of the paint.
After yielding three 5-on-5 goals in his previous four starts, Thompson was victimized for three of them in less than three minutes, and there was little he could do on any of them.
“Similar to last game, I think our first two periods weren’t great,” says Thompson. “It seems like there is a trend of how we’re getting scored on right now, and I think it’s hurting us. It’s something we have to clean up. It’s easy to fix, but we’ve just got to get back to work. But it’s definitely frustrating right now.”
Washington couldn’t cut the two-goal deficit on a late second-period power play that bled into the third period, but it was able to cobble together one lengthy offensive zone shift that culminated in a nifty Ryan Leonard goal at 9:11 of the third, but that was as close as they could get.
Leonard wove his way through traffic and into the slot and sniped a shot to the corner to briefly bring the building to life. The Caps took a penalty less than a minute later to let the air out of that balloon.
Ovechkin had an excellent late chance for the equalizer on a redirect in front, but his shot rattled between the pads of Sharks goalie Alex Nedeljkovic for a bit before he secured the disc.
Washington moved the puck around well and had several retrievals during its 6-on-5 stretch with Thompson pulled for the extra attacker, but the Caps missed the net four times, the Sharks blocked four more tries, and Nedeljkovic shot down the only shot he faced during that span of nearly three minutes, an Ovechkin shot from the left flank.
Especially for a team ranked 30th in the League in goals against, San Jose played a sturdy defensive game, and the Sharks started a rugged stretch – they’ll play nine of 10 games on the road starting with Thursday’s game in the District – with a big win.
“Besides our first shift of the game, we did some really good things,” says Sharks coach Ryan Warsofsky. “I liked our second; that was one of our better second periods of the season.”
The Caps have now gone 43 days and 19 games without consecutive victories. The last time they had a longer streak of futility was 19 years ago when Ovechkin was a sophomore in the NHL and they went just over two months between consecutive triumphs, skating to an abysmal 5-17-6 mark in the process.
“We’re obviously not able to make any ground up, and we don’t deserve to after that game,” says Strome. “Obviously, we played good in the third but we put ourselves in a hole early and yeah, not good enough.”
