Caps Finish Home Slate vs. Isles
Caps to honor Ovechkin in pregame ceremony on Tuesday, ahead of regular season home finale vs. Isles
The Caps conclude the home portion of their 2021-22 regular season slate on Tuesday night when they host the New York Islanders at Capital One Arena. The game is also the front end of a home and home set of contests with the Isles; the Caps visit the Islanders in Belmont on Thursday night in the front end of a season-ending set of back-to-back games. The Caps finish the season on Friday night in Manhattan against the New York Rangers.
Washington lost captain Alex Ovechkin to an upper body injury in Sunday's game against Toronto, and although the team did not practice on Monday, Ovechkin was in full uniform and on skates for Monday's team photo at MedStar Capitals Iceplex. Ovechkin left Sunday's game after barreling into the corner boards and hitting his shoulder or back against the wall at a fairly high rate of speed. He got up and left the ice under his own power, and on Monday the team announced that he was day-to-day with an upper body injury.
The Caps will conduct a pregame ceremony to honor Ovechkin's move into third place on the NHL's all-time goals list this season. Last week in Vegas, Ovechkin scored his 50th goal of the season, the ninth time in 17 seasons he has reached 50 goals, tying him with Mike Bossy and Wayne Gretzky for the most 50-goal seasons in NHL history.
By virtue of its 4-3 shootout loss to the Maple Leafs on Sunday night in the opener of its final homestand of the regular season, Washington reached the 100-point plateau for the sixth time in the last eight seasons, the only NHL team to achieve that feat over that span. But the Caps are still seeking to climb the Metropolitan Division standings ladder, and they left a point in the table in Sunday's game, letting a 3-1 lead slip from their grasp in the last eight minutes of regulation.
"I think we had the game under control," says Caps forward Marcus Johansson, whose goal lifted the Caps into their 3-1 lead early in the period. "I think we were the better team for the most part in this game, and I don't think we should let off the gas just because we're up 3-1. I think we should keep playing the same way.
"There's going to be mistakes at any given point in games, but you can't stop playing. But you've got to play the right way and when you're doing something that works, you stick with it. It's better to have it now than in a week [when the playoffs will be underway], but this is a frustrating loss. We all wanted this one. But we'll learn from it and move on."
As Johansson notes, the Caps were the better team for most of the game, and that's been good enough for Washington to earn wins on most nights lately. Since the start of March, the Caps are 16-5-3, and they're 7-1-2 in their last 10 games, with the regulation loss and one of the overtime/shootout losses coming against Toronto over that span.
"We've talked about it lately, in the first 10 minutes of the game trying to get the first goal and trying to play the right way," says Caps right wing T.J. Oshie. "I thought we did a great job [Sunday]. There was maybe five little breakdowns, and they got some good looks. There were a couple of other mistakes where guys backed each other up, which is something we've been talking about a lot. So I thought we played a great game against a team that played back-to-back. We just shot ourselves in the foot in the last 10 minutes there.
"As bad as this one feels, it feels 10 times worse when you do it in the postseason. I think it's a super good learning experience for us here, that what we did in those first 50 minutes, plus or minus a couple, was good. Maybe it's a good thing that happened, and now we can learn from how we didn't close out the game tonight."
The Caps will get a chance to redeem themselves on Tuesday against the Islanders, who will miss out on the playoffs for the first time since 2018. An early season 11-game losing streak (0-8-3) from Nov. 7-Dec. 5 proved to be too deep of a ditch for the Isles to extricate themselves from, and they were mathematically eliminated from postseason contention last week.
Washington has won each of the first two meetings between the two Metro rivals this season, taking a 2-0 shutout win in the Islanders' new home barn in Belmont, N.Y. on Jan. 15 and prevailing 4-3 in an eight-round shootout here in the District on March 15.
