Alex Ovechkin scored two more goals, Washington’s penalty kill went 7-for-7 on the night, and Charlie Lindgren made some clutch stops among his 24 saves to lift the Caps to a 6-2 win over the Utah Hockey Club at Delta Center in Salt Lake City on Monday night.
The win gives Washington an impressive sweep of a three-game road trip played in four nights, multiple time zones from home, but any joy derived from the Caps’ excellent journey was tempered by the loss of Ovechkin to an apparent lower body injury early in the third period after a collision with Utah’s Jack McBain.
“He is being evaluated as we speak,” said Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery after the game. “We’ll know more tomorrow.”
After the Caps shook off a slow start, they scored twice in 10 seconds to take control of the game. Ovechkin scored once in the first and once in the second, giving him five goals in two nights, and goals in five consecutive periods. And in victimizing Utah starting goaltender Connor Ingram, the Caps’ captain scored on his 178th different goaltender, tying Jaromir Jagr’s NHL record.
Monday’s first period was unique; it was a high event 20 minutes. Washington yielded the game’s first goal, went shorthanded four times – three of those on bench minor penalties – and it had a goal taken off the board for alleged goaltender interference. And yet, improbably, the Caps also took a 3-1 lead to the room after the opening period, a lead they believed should have been 4-1
McBain started the scoring with a rebound of a point shot at 3:05 of the first. The Caps then needed Lindgren to make a couple of key stops to keep the game close; he made stops on a Clayton Keller deflection bid and on Olli Maatta in a 1-on-1 situation down low before the five-minute mark.
Two minutes after the McBain goal, the Caps went on the kill for the first time. Within a minute of completing the kill, they pulled even on a gift of a goal from Dylan Strome. From behind his own net, rookie Utah defenseman Maveric Lamoureux threw a careless backhand feed to the front, and it went straight to Strome, high in Utah ice. The Caps center skated in, went behind the net and banked it off Ingram and in, squaring the score at 1-1 at 7:46.
Ten seconds later, the Caps had the lead. Nic Dowd won the center ice draw after the Strome goal, and Brandon Duhaime carried deep into Utah ice before issuing a perfect feed to the front for Dowd, who beat Ingram at 7:56. All five Washington skaters touched the puck during that 10-second span.
Seconds after a Washington power play failed to bear fruit, Ovechkin scored from high in Utah ice, giving the Caps a 3-1 lead at 11:05. At that point, Washington had scored three goals on five shots.
The penalty trouble came late in the first when the Caps were whistled for a pair of overlapping too many men calls, giving Utah a 5-on-3 manpower advantage for 25 seconds.
The Caps skirted that penalty peril, and they appeared to go up 4-1 on a John Carlson center point drive through traffic with 27.5 seconds left in the first. The call on the ice was goaltender interference; Connor McMichael was at the top of the paint when the shot went in. After taking their timeout to talk it over, the Caps opted to issue a coach’s challenge. When it didn’t go their way, they were assessed a third bench minor in a span of less than five minutes.
Washington’s stalwart penalty kill and the time remaining in the first impacted Carbery’s decision to challenge.
“Honestly, it did a little bit; time [and] situation,” says Carbery. “I thought [because it was] at the end of the period too, I felt like we could get through that 30 seconds. Then, starting from the center dot [with] a minute thirty [in the second], it breaks up the power play for them.
“It's just so hard with these challenges. I feel like in the whole league no one knows what it is, so I felt like in that moment to go up 4-1 was worth the challenge, because I've seen some of those called good goals, and I've seen some of them called not. We just decided that it was worth the risk there to challenge.”
The Caps killed off the carryover penalty, and they ended up with a brief 5-on-3 of their own early in the second; a stretch of just 17 seconds. Washington needed only four of those seconds to tee up Ovechkin for his second 5-on-3 power play goal of the season, a patented one-timer from his left dot office. Ovechkin’s second of the night gave him goals in five consecutive periods, it extended the Caps’ lead to 4-1 and it chased Ingram to the bench. Karel Vejmelka came on in relief at that point, at 5:38 of the second.
Just after the midpoint of the middle period, Utah drew a goal closer when Nick Bjugstad found and buried a rebound of a Nick Schmaltz shot at 11:44.
With Utah on its sixth power play of the game late in the second, Lindgren made a key glove stop on Keller’s one-timer from the right dot, preserving the two-goal Washington lead.
Lindgren and the Caps had to execute one more kill early in the third, and minutes later, Duhaime tore down the left side and scooped a shot over Vejmelka’s right shoulder from just above the goal line at 7:30 of the third.
Just before the midpoint of the third, Aliaksei Protas netted his career high seventh goal of the season to close out the scoring. Andrew Mangiapane, taking Ovechkin’s place on the top line with Strome and Protas, set up the final tally, which came at 9:56.
The Caps have now killed off 21 straight penalty killing missions on the road. The only power-play goal they’ve yielded on the road this season came in their first road game of the season almost a month ago, on Oct. 19 in New Jersey.
“I think we’ve got to tip our caps to Chucky there,” says Dowd. “They had quite a bit of good looks and Chucky made a lot of big saves. It’s been said before, but your goalie is your best penalty killer, and Chucky was our best. I think he was our best player overall tonight, but definitely on the PK.”
Ovechkin’s first goal was the game-winner; it’s the 132nd game-winner of his career, moving him to within three of Jagr (135) for that all-time NHL standard.
As they wait to hear more on Ovechkin’s condition, the Caps can be proud of pulling the full complement of six points from this rugged road trip.
“Heck of a road trip for us,” says Lindgren. “We find a way to put six goals in the net. It’s pretty incredible, the pace we’re scoring at right now. And yeah, maybe it wasn’t the best start for us, but we found it, like good teams do. You don’t accept anything below standard, and we started to pick it up. And I thought besides our start, the rest of the game we played pretty good.”
