Capitals outlast Hurricanes in a wild one, winning in a shootout
Spencer Carbery walked into the interview room Friday night at Capital One Arena and began with a rhetorical question.
“Is there anything to talk about tonight?” the Washington Capitals coach asked after his team outlasted the Carolina Hurricanes in a game that featured six ties, seven lead changes, two hat tricks and one shootout. Center Dylan Strome, who was 0 for 9 in his NHL career in the shootout before his attempt in the fifth round, scored the winner for Washington, securing a wild 7-6 win.
Winger Sonny Milano led the way for the Capitals with his first career hat trick. Darcy Kuemper started the game for Washington and made 18 saves on 22 shots; Charlie Lindgren entered to begin the third period and made seven saves — and didn’t allow a goal in the shootout. Pyotr Kochetkov stopped 19 of 25 for Carolina.
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“Going into the game, we thought, you know, wide open, back-and-forth, that’s what we do,” defenseman John Carlson said, tongue planted firmly in his cheek. “No, it was a great effort. Plenty of momentum swings. When we’re fighting tooth and nail like we have been for a while now and you get some deflating goals against like that and we get the lead and they come back, those are deflating things.
“We just put our heads down and worked through it. That pays off. That’s kind of what the night was tonight. It was just, whatever happened, everyone was giving it their all, and we wound up on the right side of it.”
Evgeny Kuznetsov’s return to Washington, just two weeks after he was traded to the Hurricanes, became an afterthought as the chaos unfolded. The shorthanded Capitals — playing without wingers Tom Wilson, who received a six-game suspension for high-sticking shortly before the game began; T.J. Oshie, who is day-to-day with an upper-body injury; and Aliaksei Protas, who is day-to-day with a lower-body injury — were on a roller-coaster ride from start to finish against Carolina.
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The Capitals trailed 2-1 after the opening 20 minutes. Sebastian Aho put Carolina ahead at 6:53, Milano tied the game on the power play at 12:45, and Jaccob Slavin restored the Hurricanes’ lead with 48 seconds left in the period. It was a back-and-forth 20 minutes. But it was relatively boring compared to the next 20 minutes.
In the second period, in a span of less than six minutes, Washington went from trailing, to being tied, to leading, to being tied again, to leading again after successfully challenging the Carolina goal for offside, to being tied again — for real this time — and eventually to trailing again.
Alex Ovechkin tied the game at two on the power play at 13:59 of the second period, set up for a tap-in finish at the back post by Strome. Less than a minute later, Milano juggled the puck up and over Kochetkov from the front of the net for his second game-tying goal of the game.
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“I thought, especially early on, when we were searching for it a bit and you could feel we hadn’t gotten into the game quite yet, I think [Milano] stepping up with those goals early on I think sort of calmed us a little bit,” Carbery said. “Like, ‘Okay, okay, we’re going to find a way tonight.’ ”
On the shift after Milano’s goal, Jordan Martinook looked to have tied the game with a backhand finish in alone on Kuemper, but the Capitals challenged the goal for offside, and it came off the board — Washington’s second successful challenge of the night (a first-period goal also was overturned). Carolina needed little time to tie things up for real, though, as Aho scored his second after being left wide-open in the left faceoff circle just 43 seconds after Milano’s tally.
A point shot from Brady Skjei went in off Kuemper’s glove with six seconds remaining in the frame to put the Hurricanes back in the lead. The goal also spelled the end of the night for Kuemper.
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“I just felt like, at that point, the group was extremely deflated,” Carbery said. “We were just desperately trying to get that game to the intermission. We had the lead, then we give it back. Now we’re trailing going in. I felt like I needed to do something as a coach, and that’s a not a decision that I take lightly, to take Kuemps out there. … I just feel like it wasn’t Darc’s night and feel like we needed to change momentum somehow, some way, going into that third period.”
The roller-coaster ride wasn’t done yet — for either side — after 40 minutes.
Carlson tied the game 3:45 into the third period with a blast from just inside the blue line on the power play, the Capitals’ third power-play goal of the game. And at the 8:19 mark, Milano scored his third of the game on a fluttering shot that fooled a screened Kochetkov — giving Washington its second lead of the game. But it still wasn’t the last time the lead changed.
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Seth Jarvis evened things up at 5 on the power play just over a minute later, marking the fifth time the score was tied. Center Connor McMichael then put the Capitals back ahead as he swatted a rebound past Kochetkov with 6:07 left to play, but the twists and turns of the affair weren’t finished.
Carolina called a timeout to pull Kochetkov for a six-on-five advantage with 2:40 left, and just 19 seconds later, Aho completed his own hat trick to tie the game and force overtime.
Neither side had an overwhelming number of chances in overtime. In the shootout, Kuznetsov went first and tested Lindgren with his trademark slow-motion attempt, but Lindgren made the save with his blocker. No one scored until Strome fired a shot over Kochetkov in the fifth round to end the game.
The win gave Washington a critical two points in its still-hopeful quest to make the playoffs, moving it within one point of the Detroit Red Wings for the second wild-card spot.
“We’ve been on edge for a number of weeks now already,” Carlson said. “That’s a testament to the guys that just kept coming back and kept fighting.”
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