Four months to the day after the sign-and-trade swap that sent him from Buffalo to Washington, Alex Tuch bit the hand that once fed him, ripping a shot from the slot past Sabres netminder Ukka-Pekka Luukkonen at 3:42 of overtime, lifting the Caps to a 4-3 comeback victory on Saturday night at Capital One Arena.
Tuch’s second goal of the game came off a sublime feed from Dylan Strome behind the Buffalo net; Strome surveyed briefly before threading a perfect feed to Tuch’s tape. From just above the hash marks, the big winger snapped home his seventh goal of the season, and his fourth game-winning goal among Washington’s six victories.
“It feels pretty good,” says Tuch in the aftermath of the win. “It feels really good. I loved playing for the Sabres, and I think everyone knows that. And when you play against your former team – I’ve done it a couple of times before – you always want to score, and to be able to get the game-winner was pretty special.”
Tuch’s two-goal game was his third in just 10 games with Washington; he becomes the fastest Capitals player to notch their first three multi-goal games with the franchise, nudging captain Alex Ovechkin – who did it in 11 games in 2005-06 – from the record books.
And if there are overtime heroics to be had, chances are Strome is involved. With his primary helper on Tuch’s game-winner, Strome has factored on 12 of Washington’s 15 overtime goals since the start of the 2023-24 campaign.
Playing for the first time in four days, the Caps took a while to find their footing in the first frame; they were guilty of icing the puck four times in the game’s first seven minutes.
Buffalo jumped out to a 1-0 lead at 6:27 on a Jack Quinn goal. Buffalo blueliner Olen Zellweger spotted Quinn on the weak side and fed him, and Quinn wisely took the time and space given to him, galloping toward the net before chipping a shot over Charlie Lindgren’s right shoulder.
Just over four minutes later, Buffalo doubled its lead, capitalizing on a Washington turnover. Caps defenseman Jakob Chychrun turned it over below his own goal line, and Ryan McLeod pounced on it and bumped it to Josh Doan, whose one-timer from the right dot glanced off Lindgren and in at 10:36.
When Doan scored, it marked the first time the Caps had been in a 2-0 hole in three weeks.
With just under four minutes remaining in the first frame, the Caps cut the lead in half when Tuch was credited with his sixth goal of the season at 16:10. Tuch seemed to be reading his ex-teammates mail all night; he was getting his stick in the way of intended passes and breaking up plays constantly. In this instance, Tuch got his stick on a clearing attempt, and it bounded off Tage Thompson’s twig and behind Buffalo goaltender Ukka-Pekka Luukkonen to make it a 2-1 game.
“I know a couple of tendencies,” says Tuch, when asked if he used any proprietary information to get his stick in the way of shots and intended passes from his former teammates. “But a couple of lucky bounces, too. There were a couple – on both sides – that were little weird pucks that ended up being turnovers.”
The Caps wrangled themselves the lead in the second period when Strome struck for a pair of goals. As a Washington power play was expiring early in the middle frame, Chychrun kept a puck in at the Buffalo blueline and sent it back toward the net. It hit Jordan Kyrou and bounded to the net front where Strome got to it and put a backhander behind Luukkonen, squaring the score at 2-2 at 2:59.
Lindgren stopped all eight shots he faced in the middle frame, and several of them were crucial stops. He made an important save on McLeod while Washington was on that power play early in the second period, seconds before Strome’s first goal. And he thwarted Rasmus Dahlin and Quinn in short succession in the front half of the frame.
Perhaps Lindgren’s best stop of the period was a denial of Zach Benson on a shorthanded breakaway; less than a minute later, Strome struck again.
Back in the lineup after missing the last two games because of illness, Justin Sourdif was flying on Saturday night. With just himself and Strome in the midst of five white-sweatered Sabres, Sourdif hung onto the puck behind the Buffalo net, then threaded the needle to Strome in front. Strome’s shot eluded Luukonen at 17:24, giving Washington its first lead of the night, 3-2.
With about a minute left in the second, Lindgren got a piece of a Mattias Samuelsson one-timer from the slot, enabling the Caps to carry that one-goal lead into the final frame.
Buffalo has been a strong third period team in the early going of this season, and the Sabres put plenty of early heat on the Caps in their own end in the early minutes of the third, grazing iron a couple of times.
At 2:20 of the third, the Sabres got a fortuitous bounce of their own when Noah Oslund’s centering feed hit Caps defenseman Matt Roy and slid into the Washington net to make it 3-3.
Lindgren and Washington’s penalty-killing outfit combined to snuff out a pair of Buffalo power plays in the third period, and both goaltenders were sharp. The Caps had one more late power play, but Luukkonen denied Kyrou twice to preserve the deadlock, setting the stage for Tuch’s overtime heroics, with a big assist from Strome.
“We just controlled the play, like they did to us on that first shift [of overtime],” recounts Strome of the game-winner. “I saw a chance to maybe go behind the net, and I feel like in 3-on-3 there is a lot more ice available and they’re probably not going to attack you; you can just come out the other side.
“Tuchie made a great move to get away from the guy, and I saw him in the slot. And he’s a really good shooter, so he just put it in the net.”
None of it happens without Lindgren’s stops in the second. Making consecutive starts on home ice for the first time in calendar 2026, Lindgren wasn’t happy with the first two Buffalo goals. But the goaltender with the heart of a fourth-liner found a way to battle back.
“For me personally, I did not like my start at all,” says Lindgren. “The first two goals, I felt like I dug the team a little bit of a hole, and I really appreciate the team's effort in front of me. I just kept on working, kept on fighting.
“We came into the first intermission down 2-1, and then I felt like I just had to – as [goaltending coach] Scotty Murray said – man up, and I just wanted to play my game and felt like I did that the rest of the game. But I thought the guys in front of me did a terrific job tonight. Just worked their tails off, and I have a ton of appreciation for that.”
The guys in front of Lindgren combined for 21 blocked shots, led by Chychrun’s five. In the end, the Caps picked up a pair of points in their first overtime game of the season. And they dug out of an early two-goal hole to do it.
“Could he have made a save on one of those first two?” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery of Lindgren. “For sure. But we could have done a better job in front of him. So, you're in the situation you're in. The air has been completely let out of the building. Our whole bench is like, ‘We're down two nothing. What are we going to do? Are we going to just ride off into the sunset and say that it’s not our night?’
“But our guys and [Lindgren] specifically dug in, and we start to claw our way back. We start to have some productive shifts. We started to tilt the ice a little bit, even though it didn't go in the back of the net and it was 2-0. And where I think he makes the difference in that hockey game is in the second period when we're still down, and he makes like two or three key saves to keep that at 2-1 or 2-2, where we've clawed our way back.”
Buffalo entered the game with the least amount of scoreboard lead time in the League, and it led for more than 16 minutes, but could not close the deal.
“We had five guys back in our zone on the third [Washington] goal,” laments Buffalo coach Lindy Ruff. “We don’t execute; I thought the read by our defenseman wasn’t very good and we gave them a pretty easy one.
“We had some good opportunities late in the second, we’ve got Benson in alone, we’ve got Samuelsson alone in the slot, and [Lindgren] makes a heck of a save.
“There were some big mistakes by both teams; they capitalized on a couple of ours and I thought we could have capitalized on a couple of theirs late."
