Rebound – One of the hallmarks of the 2024-25 Washington Capitals is the team’s resilience and its ability to recover and rebound from the occasional bad beats suffered over the course of the campaign. The Caps were diligent at ensuring that one loss rarely spun into consecutive setbacks, and they typically followed those losses by stacking up multiple wins in their wake.
As they seek to rebound from a 2-1 overtime loss – as lopsided an overtime loss as you’re likely to see in terms of territorial and possession metrics – in Game 1 of their second-round Stanley Cup playoff series with the Carolina Hurricanes, the Caps will lean on that positive trait that not only served them well throughout the regular season, but also in the first round of these same playoffs against the Montreal Canadiens.
“I think it’s exactly that,” says Caps center Dylan Strome. “We’ve done a good job of finding ways to rebound quickly, and obviously at this time of year, you need that the most. And we’ve done it the whole year; we’ve found ways of not letting one [loss] turn into two and turn into three, and we find our game pretty quickly. I know we’ll be ready tonight.”
During the regular season, the Caps were 24-7-1 in games following a defeat. Frequently under those circumstances, they were able to string together multiple wins immediately following losses, as they did to close out the Canadiens in the first round of the playoffs.
Game 3 against Montreal was far off brand for the Capitals. They yielded goals against in the final minute of each of the first two periods, gave up a pair of power-play goals to the Habs, and saw five of their turnovers result in Montreal goals within less than 10 seconds. Even with all that adversity – much of it self-inflicted – they were all even at 3-3 early in the third period of that game, one shot away from taking the lead and fostering a different outcome.
The Caps lost a 6-3 decision that night, but they rallied to win the next two games in convincing fashion, closing out the Canadiens. They’ll rely on those and several regular season experiences as they seek to square the series with Carolina here tonight.
“I think it just speaks to our team’s character and the leadership on this team and the depth that we have,” says Caps defenseman Matt Roy, Washington’s ice time leader with a nightly average of 24:39 in these playoffs. “Everyone is contributing at the right moments and guys are buckling down at big moments defensively; the [penalty kill] has been coming up big. Everyone in here is a gamer, we’re all competitive on this team, and we’re all trying to do the right thing to get a win.”
The businesslike attitude is noticeable.
“Yeah, you could feel a seriousness to the group over the last day and a half,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “Which is no different for our team; I’ve felt like that all year. When we don’t play to our standard, it bothers our group whether its game 14 of the regular season or it’s Game 1 of the second round of the playoffs. There is a focus and a seriousness to the group of we need to correct some things and make sure that we’re a lot better tonight.”
“We didn’t play Capitals hockey in Game 1; we just didn’t get into it right from the beginning,” says Strome. “We played decent defensively, which gave us a chance to win that game – and that’s always a good sign – but we need to have the puck more, we need to control the puck more and get more shots, more traffic. There just wasn’t enough [offensive] zone time from us.
“Like I said, it wasn’t our brand of hockey, and we’ll be better tonight.”
Another Chance – Our first interaction with defenseman Trevor van Riemsdyk came more than a decade ago, when he was early in his rookie season with Chicago, this after making a star-studded Blackhawks team as an undrafted college free agent out of the University of New Hampshire. This was November of 2014, when the Caps were in Chicago for an early season meeting with the Hawks, and the logos and uniforms for the 2015 Winter Classic had just been unveiled, and we were tasked with getting some reaction from a star-studded veteran laden Chicago room
Even as a young rookie in the League, van Riemsdyk was well spoken and articulate and more than willing to speak with us for a few minutes. Our opinion of him as a player and a human has only soared since, and we were happy to hear Carbery deliver some well-deserved words of praise for his first-round performance against Montreal.
“I thought he was fantastic in the first round, throughout that series,” said Carbery before the second round got underway. “We needed more from multiple guys on our back end with the loss of Marty Fehervary for the season, and I thought he was a guy that stepped up big time in that first-round series and elevated his game, and he played more minutes. I just thought from a breakout, clean puck play, defensive closes off the rush and in the defensive zone, he was as good as any of our defensemen that we had in that series.
“It’s a thankless job for a defenseman to move pucks cleanly on breakouts and through the neutral zone, and to defend really well in all your 1-on-1 situations because you see it on the film [over and over]. He gets no assists for it, he gets no accolades, there’s no highlights of it. But when you dive into the film of it, it’s just [done] consistently and those lead to positive shifts for our team. I thought he was outstanding in that first round.”
Actually, van Riemsdyk did pick up a pair of critical secondary assists in the Caps’ Game 4 third period comeback in which they grabbed hold of that series and refused to let go. The veteran defenseman had helpers on both Brandon Duhaime’s tying goal early in the third and Andrew Mangiapane’s go-ahead marker late in the final frame, issuing a sublime stretch feed from deep in his own end to spark that Mangiapane game-winner.
Typically though, as Carbery says, van Riemsdyk’s game is more cerebral and defensive, and as the seasons go by and he closes in on 700 career games – second only to John Carlson in experience among Washington blueliners – he is more keenly aware of the passage of time and how critical and precious each playoff opportunity is.
As a rookie on that 2014-15 Blackhawks team, van Riemsdyk became a Stanley Cup winner as a rookie. But having an older brother – longtime left wing James van Riemsdyk – in the League ahead of him, he was also well aware of playoff heartbreak.
“Obviously you don't think you're going to win it every year,” reflects van Riemsdyk. “But my brother, in his rookie year also went to the [Cup] Final, but they lost. But yeah, when I was in Chicago those three years, I felt like I understood – because of watching James and how hard it is in the playoffs and seeing it more personally – just how hard it is.
“Our teams in Chicago, my first few years, I was so lucky because that's all I had known, and we had some pretty special groups there. And this team reminds me a lot of that; we have a ton of depth, star power, great goaltending, a really tight locker room and I think that's all important.”
As a member of the 2018-19 Carolina Hurricanes squad that knocked the defending Cup champion Capitals out of the playoffs in double overtime of Game 7 that spring, van Riemsdyk has more recent second round experience than many of his current teammates, but that trip he made with the Canes to the Eastern Conference final in the spring of 2019 was the last time he played beyond round one before this spring.
“When you miss it for the first time, or when you have a stretch where you think you have teams that have a good shot, and yet you don't do what you can with it, I think it starts to sink in more and more,” he says. “And then as you get older and older, you start counting down how many more years you may have left and how many more chances that may be.
“So, yeah, you don't want to squander them, especially with a group that – and I know you say it probably a lot of years – deep down, you can really feel it with this group, how tight everyone is, how much fun everyone has in the room. And I think that's important for playoff success, because there's going to be a lot of ups and downs.
“There will be big home and road playoff wins where you feel like you're on top of the world, and then when you lose games you think you should win in the playoffs, it can be tough to handle. But the teams that are tighter and the teams that can handle the losses generally win more.”
In The Nets – Logan Thompson was the primary reason the Capitals had a chance to win Tuesday’s Game 1 of this series; he weathered nearly constant pressure and zone time from the Hurricanes and finished the night with 31 saves on 33 shots.
This series between the Caps and Canes features the NHL’s top two goaltenders from a save percentage standpoint, among those who’ve made at least three appearances in the postseason. Carolina’s Frederik Andersen leads at .935 and Thompson follows at .926.
Thompson (7.7 goals saved above expected) and Andersen (6.2 goals saved above expected) are also the League leaders in that category, according to moneypuck.com.
It will be upon the Capitals to find a way to test and stress Andersen more frequently and more thoroughly than they did in Game 1, and doing so would also lessen some of the pressure at Thompson’s end of the ice.
Of Washington’s 14 shots on net in Game 1, only 10 came at even strength: two of them in the first period (both in the back half of the first, more than seven minutes apart), six in the second period and two in the third. The first four of the Caps’ second-period shots came in the first four minutes of the frame; Protas scored on the fourth of them, and more than eight minutes of playing time passed before Andersen was tested again.
All Lined Up – Here’s how the Capitals and the Hurricanes might look for Thursday night’s Game 2 of the second-round playoff series between the two teams:
WASHINGTON
Forwards
8-Ovechkin, 17-Strome, 21-Protas
24-McMichael, 80-Dubois, 43-Wilson
88-Mangiapane, 20-Eller, 72-Beauvillier
22-Duhaime, 26-Dowd, 16-Raddysh
Defensemen
6-Chychrun, 74-Carlson
3-Roy, 38-Sandin
27-Alexeyev, 57-van Riemsdyk
Goaltenders
48-Thompson
79-Lindgren
Extras
9-Leonard
25-Bear
52-McIlrath
53-Frank
78-Gibson
Out/Injured
15-Milano (upper body)
19-Backstrom (hip)
42-Fehervary (lower body)
77-Oshie (back)
CAROLINA
Forwards
37-Svechnikov, 20-Aho, 53-Blake
71-Hall, 82-Kotkaniemi, 22-Stankoven
48-Martinook, 11-Staal, 24-Jarvis
50-Robinson, 77-Jankowski, 28-Carrier
Defensemen
74-Slavin, 8-Burns
7-Orlov, 5-Chatfield
4-Gostisbehere, 26-Walker
Goaltenders
31-Andersen
52-Kochetkov
Extras
21-Nikishin
27-Jost
41-Martin
42-Smith
54-Jaaska
56-Morrow
61-Stillman
80-Khazheyev
96-Roslovic
Out/Injured
71-Fast (upper body)
