Friday night was billed as Margaritaville Night at Capital One Arena, but by game’s end, it was more like a 1980s throwback night. For 65 minutes and a few more in the shootout, the Caps and the Carolina Hurricanes traded goals, blows, mistakes, and even a few saves. At night’s end, it was the Caps with the two points in a wild 7-6 shootout win.
No one who witnessed it will ever forget it.
Playing in his 299th career NHL game, Sonny Milano notched his first career hat trick for Washington – and the 100th hat trick of this NHL season – but virtually everyone in the building believed that Milano’s third goal was actually John Carlson’s second goal of the game, so very few hats ever made their way to the ice. And the strains of Van McCoy’s “The Hustle” – Milano’s sublime goal song – weren’t heard for a third time until a television timeout later in the third period.
Dylan Strome had three assists and the shootout game-winner in the fifth round of the skills competition; his shootout goal was the first of his eight-year NHL career – he entered the game 0-for-9 lifetime.
Sebastian Aho had a hat trick for Carolina, including the game-tying tally that forced overtime with 2:21 remaining in regulation, with Carolina netminder Pyotr Kochetkov on the bench for an extra attacker. Carolina’s Jake Guentzel had three assists.
Alex Ovechkin scored on a Washington power play in the second period – his sixth goal in the last four games – he is now 48 goals shy of matching Wayne Gretzky’s all-time NHL career record (894). Ovechkin also recorded his 1,540th career point to slide past Joe Thornton (1,539) for 13th place on the NHL’s all-time scoring ledger.
Crucially, the Caps crack video coaching crew took two goals off the board, one for goaltender interference and one because Carolina was offside on the play. That’s three successful challenges for them in two games on the homestand.
Washington’s power play, much maligned early in the season, scored three goals on six tries, with Milano scoring in the first, Ovechkin in the second, and Carlson in the third period.
If all the goals weren’t enough, Friday’s game had some outside drama as well. Caps right wing Tom Wilson was handed a six-game suspension for hi-sticking Toronto’s Noah Gregor in Wednesday’s homestand opener; the suspension was announced shortly before the game’s opening puck drop. And Friday’s game also marked Evgeny Kuznetsov’s return to Washington for the first time since he was dealt to the Hurricanes at the trade deadline two weeks ago.
So yeah, it was a high event night at the big barn on F St.
“Is there anything to talk about tonight?” quipped Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery ahead of his postgame press conference.
“That was certainly a game that the fans and the viewers at home got their money’s worth,” says Carbery. “There was a lot going on there in that 60 minutes.”
Sixty-five minutes, but who’s counting? Friday’s game took three hours and four minutes to complete, one of the longest regular season games in recent memory.
Neither team ever enjoyed a multi-goal lead, and the first of Washington’s two successful coach’s challenges actually prevented the Canes from taking what would have been a 3-1 lead at that juncture of the contest.
The first period was the quietest in terms of red lights; Aho started the scoring at 6:53 and Milano knotted the score on the power play at 12:45, with a nifty backhander under the bar from in tight. Carolina’s Jaccob Slavin scored in the final minute of the first, enabling the Canes to take a 2-1 lead to the intermission.
Kuznetsov was deemed to have interfered with Washington’s starting goaltender Darcy Kuemper, negating what would have been a Brent Burns goal at 8:48 of the second. Five minutes later, Ovechkin’s power-play goal evened the game at 2-2.
Milano’s second goal was a dazzler; Strome set it up off a left dot draw win – and a no look, backhand feed to Milano – in the offensive zone. Milano carried to the top of the paint, lifted the puck into the air, then popped it up again, a touch higher, arcing it just enough to float over the right shoulder of Kochetkov for the Caps’ first lead of the night, 3-2 at 14:40.
Asked after the game if he was trying to whack it a third time when it fell behind Kochetkov, Milano was firm in his reply.
“What happened was what I was trying to do,” he said.
But Aho answered with his second of the night to knot the score again, and Carolina’s Brady Skjei scored off of Kuemper’s glove with 5.5 seconds left in the second, sending the Canes to the room with a one-goal lead after yet another last-minute goal.
The Caps turned to Charlie Lindgren at the start of the third; Kuemper finished with 18 saves on 22 shots in 40 minutes of work.
“I just felt like, at that point, the group was extremely deflated,” says Carbery of the goaltending change. “We were just desperately trying to get that game into the intermission, and we had the lead, then we gave it back, and now we’re trailing going in [to the third]. I felt like I needed to do something as a coach.
"It’s not a decision that I take lightly – to take Kuemps out there – but with the amount of goals that are going in and even the two challenges that are successful, and the puck plays behind the net [which proceeded each of the Canes’ first two goals], I just felt like it wasn’t Darcy’s night, and I felt like we needed to change momentum.”
Carlson scored on a power play at 3:45 of the third, making it a 4-4 game. Just under five minutes later, a Milano shot bounded around the front of the net and Carlson appeared to have scored from just off the left post, albeit with his stick at a dangerously high level. The building went nuts, Carlson celebrated the Caps’ second lead of the night and what he thought was his second goal of the night, while the officials took another look to make sure that Carlson’s stick wasn’t too high, and that the goal was legal. What they saw was Carlson making no contact with the puck, and it was a good goal – Milano's third of the night, all of them magical in their own unique way. The Caps led 5-4 at 8:19.
On a night when no lead was safe, this one lasted all of 76 seconds. That’s when Guentzel picked up his third primary helper of the game, setting up the red-hot Seth Jarvis, who notched his eighth goal in the last eight games.
At 13:53 of the third, Connor McMichael tapped home the rebound of a Trevor van Riemsdyk point drive, giving the Caps a 6-5 lead that lasted until Aho completed the hat trick with a 6-on-5 goal.
Saves might have been few and far between in the first 60, but both goalies made some big stops in overtime, and Strome was the only one of 10 skaters to score in the extra session.
“I just waited for him to open up,” says Strome of Kochetkov. “And then I just found a hole.”
Carolina’s road winning streak was halted at six, but the Canes are still a torrid 15-1-3 in their last 19 road contests.
“It was a weird game,” says Carolina coach Rod Brind’Amour. “Just every little bad bounce seemed to go against us tonight. So when you have those two goals get called back, a couple of weird things around the net – just bounces that really didn’t go our way. I think we had two power plays, and they had five. And we couldn’t kill them; that’s the difference in the game.”
Coming off a 7-3 loss on Wednesday, the Caps desperately needed the two points, and it didn’t matter how they got them. Friday’s win was ugly, but you never apologize for a victory.
“It was a great effort,” says Carlson, whose 29:57 workload was highest on the night for any skater on either side. “Plenty of momentum swings, and 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. And we just put our heads down and worked through it, and that pays off.
“I think that’s what the night was tonight. It was just, whatever happened, everyone was giving their all. And we wound up on the right side of it.”
If it were presented as a film script, Friday’s game would have been summarily dismissed as a laughable fantasy. If it were a fever dream, it would make much more sense. And if the late Jack Buck had been a hockey play-by-play guy, he certainly would have exclaimed, “I don’t believe what I just saw.” Probably even more than once.
