Let’s not bury the lede here; Alex Ovechkin scored the 892nd goal of his NHL career on Thursday in Carolina at Raleigh’s Lenovo Center, pulling to within a hat trick of surpassing Wayne Gretzky (894) for the NHL’s all-time goals record. Ovechkin’s goal came on a 5-on-3 power play late in the second period, his third two-man advantage goal this season.
Unfortunately for the Caps, it was Washington’s only goal of the game in a 5-1 defeat. Carolina scored three power-play goals – the most the Caps have yielded in a single game this season – to account for most of the difference between the two teams tonight.
Throughout the night, tempers simmered on both sides. In the third period, they boiled over. By night’s end, a total of 142 penalty minutes were assessed in the contest, with the Caps receiving 74 minutes to Carolina’s 68.
Logan Thompson started in goal for Washington; he yielded the game’s first three goals before yielding to Charlie Lindgren at the start of the second. But Thompson wasn’t pulled for ineffectiveness on a night in which Washington was playing its second game in as many nights; no Caps goaltender has suffered that fate this season, 75 games deep now.
Just over a minute after Carolina took a 1-0 lead, a Sean Walker shot caught Thompson in the mask, knocking the bucket from his head and leading to a halt in play. Thompson finished the first period before Lindgren came on in relief.
Against a well-rested – and red hot – Carolina club, the Caps were nowhere near good enough in the first period, though they warmed to the task as the game wore on.
“First couple of shifts, they get momentum,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “We just can’t get out of our zone clean. And then we make a turnover through the middle that ends up in the back of our net. And then we have another failed exit, take a penalty, and then it went downhill."
Less than a minute after Hurricanes netminder Frederik Andersen stopped Aliaksei Protas on a 2-on-1 in Washington’s best – and perhaps only – scoring chance of the first frame, Jakob Chychrun’s defensive zone turnover turned into an unassisted goal for Walker, staking the home team to a 1-0 lead at 6:14 of the first.
The Caps didn’t help themselves by taking a pair of unnecessary penalties in the middle of the frame. Lars Eller went off for interference and Rasmus Sandin sent the puck over the glass. Both of those penalties resulted in Carolina power-play goals.
First, Jackson Blake put a shot between Logan Thompson’s legs at 10:11 of the first. Just over three minutes later, Seth Jarvis made it a 3-0 game with a rip from the left dot at 13:21.
“It was just a good team effort,” says Carolina coach Rod Brind’Amour. “Everybody was contributing, doing their job, and we capitalized. We were able to score some goals on some good chances that we had, especially early. Against a good team, that’s the way you have to do it.”
There were five power plays doled out in the first frame of Wednesday’s game; that’s more than both teams combined for in 24 of Washington’s first 74 games this season.
There would be plenty more to come.
Things settled down a bit in the second, but Carolina’s Logan Stankoven extended the lead to 4-0 at 9:27 of the middle period, putting the Caps down by four goals for the first time this season, midway through game No. 75.
When Carolina got into some penalty soup late in the second, the Caps found themselves with a two-man advantage for 82 seconds, with less than a minute remaining in the middle period.
That’s when Chychrun put it on a tee for Ovechkin, who drilled it to the far right corner of the cage for his 39th goal of the season and No. 892 of his career.
Having cut the lead to 4-1 with that goal, the Caps weren’t able to bag another on the carryover portion of the power play in the third period. When Blake scored his second power-play goal of the game on a nifty backhander to the shelf at 6:55 of the third, the scoring was done for the night, but the feistiness was just beginning.
The game’s penalty minute total was inflated by a raft of misconducts – eight of them, four a side – doled out in the third. At one point late in the contest, the Caps had six forwards they were able to deploy; four had been handed misconducts and two others were in the box for other transgressions.
“In a game like this, there is frustration,” says Caps center P-L Dubois. “And when guys go unpunished for dirty plays, dirty slashing, the ref is a bit overwhelmed and missed some key, key things that happen, and then frustration takes over. It’s an emotional sport, and like I said, when guys don’t get punished by the referees – and I don’t know, maybe they didn’t see anything – the frustration takes over. And then that happens.”
There were only two fighting majors in the whole mess. Brandon Duhaime fought Tyson Jost and Connor McMichael went with Jalen Chatfield. It was the second of those scraps that really – and rightly – rankled Washington.
After McMichael lost his helmet, Chatfield used his leg against McMichael’s to violently body slam the helmetless Washington forward to the ice in one of the most reckless, dangerous and potentially career ending incidents we’ve seen in quite some time. Fortunately, McMichael was unhurt, but there was no putting the lid back on the pot after that.
“We’re not going to go quietly into the night, if we feel as a group or our guys feel like something that happens on the ice crosses the line, they’re going to handle it,” says Carbery.
The two teams conclude their season series next Thursday in Washington.
