Last month in Denver, Nathan MacKinnon scored four goals in a 6-2 Colorado win over the Capitals. In Tuesday’s rematch between the two teams at Capital One Arena, the Caps were able to keep MacKinnon in check, relatively speaking (he had two assists), but the Avs’ depth came to the fore, and Colorado skated away with a 6-3 win, halting a season-long four-game slide (0-3-1) in the process.
Artturi Lehkonen had a pair of goals and he also supplied a brilliant assist on Mikko Rantanen’s game-winner on the power play late in the second period. Lehkonen finished with four points, leading a diverse Colorado attack – six Avs had multiple points in Tuesday's win – as the Caps fell for the eighth time in nine games (1-6-2).
Caps’ captain Alex Ovechkin was able to stay hot offensively, scoring on a Washington power play in the third period, his sixth straight game with a goal.
Washington battled back to even after digging an early hole in Tuesday’s game, but it’s far too late in the season for moral victories. They’re rapidly running out of time to climb back into the playoff hunt.
“Those were probably the positives, us fighting back in the first after getting down early,” says Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery. “So there’s that, and even in the third period – once we’re down two – I liked our third period, probably our best period of the night.
“I thought we played hard, we competed, we were right there, trying to find a way to get that equalizer. Those were the positives, big-picture wise.”
The Caps got off to an inauspicious start on Tuesday against the Avs, but they were quickly able to adjust, getting a course correction before the first period was over.
On the first shift of the game, Colorado had a 3-on-1 rush with MacKinnon carrying and eventually shooting the puck. Charlie Lindgren gloved down MacKinnon’s opening salvo from the slot in Tuesday’s game.
Even so, the Avs wasted little time in scoring twice before the first television timeout. First, Ross Colton scored off a nifty setup from Miles Wood, and the Caps burned their timeout while deciding whether to issue a coach’s challenge – for offside – or not; they ultimately opted not to do so. Colton’s goal made it 1-0 for the visitors at 2:46 of the first.
After the game, Carbery noted that the Caps took the timeout to take another couple of looks at the play; he believed that Wood might not have had control of the puck as he crossed the line ahead of it, but he ultimately decided not to roll the dice on a coach’s challenge, knowing how lethal Colorado’s power play can be.
Just over two minutes later, Devon Toews floated a seeing eye shot through a maze of traffic and past Lindgren, doubling the Colorado lead to 2-0 at 4:57, and giving the Avalanche its quickest two goals from the start of a game this season.
The first two Avalanche goals came on consecutive shots on net, and the Caps were able to match that feat by the midpoint of the opening frame.
First, Beck Malenstyn got the Caps on the board at 9:16, cutting the Colorado cushion in half. Nic Dowd pushed the puck to Martin Fehervary at the right point, and Malenstyn made a beeline for the net. Fehervary put a drive toward the net on the near side, and Malentsyn caught it with his skate blade, bumped it to his stick, curled around the blue paint and deposited the puck into the open side for his fifth goal of the season.
“It was a great, heads up play by Marty,” says Malenstyn. “I was just trying to get to the net. Just a little shot/pass in there that I was able to luckily handle it, and to have a wide open net after.”
On the very next shift, the Caps pulled even with a bit of puck luck. After an effective Washington forecheck created a turnover, Anthony Mantha fed Connor McMichael, who had the puck on the left side of the ice. McMichael tried to make a return feed, and the puck clicked off a Colorado defender and went behind Avs’ goalie Alexandar Georgiev and in, making a 2-2 tilt at the 10-minute mark of the first.
“That definitely wasn’t the start we wanted,” says Lindgren. “Obviously, we know how they play; they’re fast, and they want to play in transition. So we got down 2-0 early, but obviously a heck of a bounce back to respond, get two goals of our own and then went into the first intermission with a tie hockey game.”
Alas, the Avs were able to scratch out a couple more tallies in the second, and this time, the Caps weren’t able to fully respond.
At 8:50 of the middle frame, Colton found Lehkonen on the weak side, and the latter was able to tap it into a yawning cage to put the Avs back on top, 3-2.
Late in the second, the Caps were whistled for a bench minor for too many men on the ice, and Colorado made them pay. From just above the paint, Lehkonen issued a sublime, no-look, between-the-legs feed to Rantanen, who drilled a one-timer home from the right dot, restoring the Avs’ two-goal lead at 17:03.
Washington opened the third on the power play, but it wasn’t able to creep closer to Colorado with that man advantage. But eight minutes into the final frame, Avs’ defenseman Josh Manson was boxed for elbowing Tom Wilson. And a minute into that power play, Ovechkin took a John Carlson feed tee-up feed and powered a one-timer from his left dot office and into the net, making it a 4-3 game.
Ovechkin’s six-game string of games with a goal is his longest scoring spree since 2018-19, and the fifth scoring streak of six or more games in his career. He becomes just the third player in League history aged 38 or older to string together six or more games with a goal, joining Hockey Hall of Famers Johnny Bucyk (six games in 1974-75) and Brett Hull (seven games in 2003-04) on that short list.
Soon after scoring his sixth power-play goal of the season to vault into the team lead, Ovechkin narrowly missed knotting the score; his shot from the slot rang the inside of the left post and bounced off Georgiev’s back. The Caps weren’t able to get another puck behind the Avs' workhorse goalie, and last-minute empty-net goals from Lehkonen and Wood accounted for the 6-3 final.
Down to just 30 games remaining in their season – and with only nine games remaining between now and the March 8 trade deadline – the Caps desperately need to stack up some wins, and they need to do so quickly.
“I think I speak for everyone here; we’re tired of losing hockey games,” says Lindgren. “We’ve got a team in here that’s certainly capable of winning hockey games. We know what our blueprint is, and we’ve been playing some pretty darned good hockey here, especially the last three games. I think we played to our identity, and for us to win, that’s what we’ve got to do.
“We don’t play like Colorado; that’s not our style. We’re a team that relies on defending well, and obviously capitalizing on our chances. We’ve got guys that compete extremely hard, and we’ve got a lot of high character guys in this room. But it sucks losing. We’ve got a couple of days here before our next game, but certainly we need to start stringing together wins. We’ve really got zero choice. It’s win now, or we make our own bed.”
