Needing a win of any kind to steer out of a spiral that has plagued them for a month, the Capitals took to the road and picked up a critical pair of points on Saturday night in Montreal, prevailing over the Canadiens by a 4-3 count.
Washington took an early lead and never trailed, but three times the Caps went up by a goal, and three times the Canadiens responded with a tying tally. Minutes after Montreal’s Nick Suzuki again knotted the score at 3-3 on a Habs’ power play midway through the third, Caps’ forward Aliaksei Protas netted what would prove to be the game-winner at 11:57 of the final period, ending a 29-game dry spell with his fourth goal of the season.
“That’s a big one,” says Protas. “As a forward, you always want to score. You just have to get to the net, get in there and just battle through that. And I found one there, and that’s great. Hopefully, it will get me going.”
Saturday’s win marked the first time in nearly a month that Washington has been able to score a many as four goals while collecting a pair of points, and the victory kept the Canadiens from sweeping the season’s series between the two clubs for the first time since 1990-91.
“It was – I thought – a great hockey game,” says Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery. “A lot of opportunities both ways. I thought we had the majority of the looks, but we did a lot of good things to create some good opportunities; I thought their goaltender was excellent. The power play [comes up] with a huge goal; probably our best looking power play that we’ve had all year long, the one minute of it.
“I love the resiliency. This game for us, as we try to stay in this fight, we had to have two points. There’s no skirting around it; we needed two points tonight. So for us to deliver – we give that lead back and then we get the game-winner – I liked a lot of the things we did tonight."
The victory did not come without cost. Early in the first, the Caps lost defenseman Martin Fehervary to a lower body injury. He finished the night with just 1:36 in ice time, taking just two shifts. According to Carbery, Fehervary "could miss some time." The other five Washington defensemen all played well in absorbing Fehervary's minutes over the remainder of the contest.
Before the game's first television timeout, the Caps hopped out to the lead when a strong offensive zone shift from the Connor McMichael line produced the game’s first goal. The scoring play itself is a relatively simple and basic one, but the Caps haven’t scored many goals via this route this season.
After working the puck around the perimeter for a bit, McMichael pushed it out to Rasmus Sandin at the left point, and Sandin quickly went to partner Nick Jensen at the right point. With Protas providing a healthy screen in front, Jensen put a shot on net, and Protas got a piece of it. Montreal netminder Jake Allen made the stop, but Anthony Mantha was in a perfect position to bury the rebound for a 1-0 Washington lead at 3:40.
Low to high, traffic, shot, rebound, goal.
Montreal responded quickly however, pulling even on an Arber Xhekaj left point shot at 5:04.
The Caps were able to restore their lead midway through the first, doing so on their first power play opportunity of the evening. Again, they resorted to simple, basic plays to get back on top. Washington worked the puck around the perimeter of the Montreal zone, going point to point, and then from Alex Ovechkin at the right point to Dylan Strome down low on the right side. From there, Strome put a perfect feed on T.J. Oshie’s tape in the bumper spot, and the latter’s quick release one-timer from there made it 2-1 at 10:00 of the first.
Oshie’s goal was the 300th of his NHL career. After the game, Oshie posed with the puck, Strome and Ovechkin, then reflected a bit on the milestone.
“I don’t really keep anything, so this is going to be one of the first pucks that I’ve kept,” says Oshie. “I’ve kept my hat trick pucks; I give them to the kids.
“This one means a lot. The last couple of years, I’ve had a lot of time out of the lineup because of injuries. I don’t really have many milestones or goals that I set for myself, but this is one that coming into the year, I wanted to reach, so it feels good.”
The two teams played to a stalemate over the back half of the first and most of the second, but Montreal’s Alex Newhook was able to square the score with a late second-period goal, making it a 2-2 contest with 3:45 left in the middle frame.
Early the third, the Caps jumped back in front on another of several strong shifts in the offensive zone, with Sonny Milano – who missed the previous 27 games because of injury and illness – supplying the go-ahead marker. Washington put some continuous heat on the Habs in their own end and a pair of ex-Canadiens – Joel Edmundson and Max Pacioretty – combined to set up Milano’s redirection from the slot at 3:27, a goal that lifted the Caps to a 3-2 advantage.
“We were in the [offensive] zone that whole shift,” says Milano. “I actually had a chance to shoot that first one, and I passed it up. Patch got me another chance, and I put it in.”
Just over two minutes after Suzuki scored Montreal’s third tying tally of the night, the Caps took the lead for the last time. Jensen made a wise pinch up the right wing wall to keep the shift alive, and then Edmundson pounded a drive from the left point that was blocked in front. Nic Dowd took a shot; it was blocked. Dowd fired again; Allen made the save. Then Protas fired another shot from the slot, and this one found twine behind Allen, finally giving the Caps the lead for good.
“Just be around the net,” says Protas. “We know we have to deliver more pucks, get more shots, because that’s the only way how you can score a goal. That’s what happened there.”
Both goaltenders made a number of key saves for their sides to keep the game tight throughout, and the Caps needed Darcy Kuemper to make seven more stops after the Protas goal, including four while Montreal pressed hard on a late 6-on-4 manpower advantage, with Allen pulled and the Habs on a power play.
John Carlson laid out to block Juraj Slafkovsky’s last-second bid for the equalizer, sending the Caps home with a desperately needed pair of points.
“Very important,” says Oshie of the victory. “We talked about it before the game. There’s not a point out there that we don’t need right now. So to get it done and to get it done in regulation, and really just scratch and claw – they obviously shifted the momentum there a couple of times, which we’ll probably have to look at the tape and see why that was, and try to correct that. We want to protect leads a little better than we did tonight. But for the guys to gut it out until the very end, it’s something that we’ve seen a lot from this group, and we’ll need it definitely going down the stretch here.”
