Caps Frustrate Philly, 5-3

Garnet Hathaway scored twice in a span of 105 seconds, netting the tying and game-winning goals late in the third to give the Caps a 5-3 win over the Flyers in Philly on Thursday night. Hathaway's first goal came less than a minute after Philadelphia had taken its first lead of the night on Gerry Mayhew's second goal of the game.

Thursday marked Hathaway's third two-goal game of the season, and the second time he struck for two tallies in the final four minutes of regulation this season. Back on Nov. 17 - three months earlier to the day - he scored the only two goals of the game in the final three and a half minutes of a 2-0 win over the Kings in Los Angeles.
"It's huge, it's a good feeling," says Hathaway of his line's performance. "But I think we've been playing well lately."
That they have. Thursday's game marked the second straight game in which that line helped manufacture a critical response goal in the third period, and the second straight game in which they cobbled together the game-winner. That line also started the scoring for Washington on Thursday.
Late in the first, the Caps broke the seal on the scoresheet, doing so for the 12th time in their last 13 road games. Two nights after they produced the game-winning goal in the third period of the Caps' 4-1 win over the Predators in Nashville, the Nic Dowd line combined to put the Caps on the board first in Philly.
Following a brief flurry of Flyers' activity in Washington ice, Dowd corralled the puck and carried into the Philadelphia end. He dropped it for Michal Kempny, whose shot from above the left circle was blocked by Oskar Lindblom. Hathaway retrieved the puck and punched it back to Dowd, who went back to Kempny at the left point. This time, Kempny walked it to the middle and drilled a shot that beat Martin Jones for a 1-0 Caps lead at 18:35 of the first period.
The game took its next turn ahead of the midpoint of the middle period when Philly's Scott Laughton put a hard hit on Kempny in the Caps' end of the ice. Kempny's partner Trevor van Riemsdyk didn't like the hit, and he and Laughton dropped mitts and had a scrap. Unfortunately for the Caps, the zebras opted to hit van Riemsdyk with an additional minor for instigating and a 10-minute misconduct, putting the Caps on the penalty kill and leaving Washington with five defensemen for the remainder of the period and then some.
Naturally, the Flyers evened the game on the ensuing power play. Seconds after firing and missing from the left circle, Mayhew made good from the same spot, tying the game at 1-1 at 8:54 of the second.
Just ahead of the midpoint of the second, the Caps got their first man advantage of the night. With 45 seconds left on that advantage, Philly's Cam Atkinson sailed the puck over the far glass, incurring a delay of game minor and giving the Caps a two-man advantage for 45 seconds. Washington wasn't able to score during the two-man portion of the power play, but it did cash in late in the Atkinson minor.
After Jones stopped Dmitry Orlov's right point drive, Joe Snively got to the rebound and buried it to restore the Caps' one-goal cushion, making it a 2-1 game at 11:12 of the second. But the Caps would not be able to nurse that narrow lead to the second intermission.
Philly came out of its own end in transition, following a stretch of Caps possession in their end. Claude Giroux made a cross-ice feed to Travis Konecny, who carried into Washington ice on a 2-on-1 with Travis Sanheim. Konecny fed him perfectly, and Sanheim scored to make it 2-2 with 58.4 seconds left in the second.
"The second period wasn't good," says Caps coach Peter Laviolette. "We didn't generate anything. We didn't bring anything to the net. We had no attack to our game. I thought we were better in the third period, but we couldn't score. Fell behind in the period, and then we're able to put some pressure on at the end and score some goals."
Before the scoring of the goals, Washington had to kill off a two-man advantage of 99 seconds in duration in the third, and it turned the trick thanks to a quartet of big stops from Samsonov and a key shot blocks from Dowd and Nick Jensen as well.
A lengthy and heated puck scrum in the corner of the Philly zone resulted in matching minors for Dowd and Flyers defenseman Keith Yandle late in the third, and Mayhew netted the go-ahead marker mere seconds after those penalties were served. Sanheim fed Mayhew in front, and he scored from the top of the paint with 3:51 remaining, putting the Flyers up by a 3-2 count.
That set the stage for Hathaway's heroics.
Down in the same corner where Dowd and Yandle had jousted minutes earlier, Carl Hagelin did the heavy lifting to come away with the puck, putting it to the right point for John Carlson. Carlson put a shot toward the net, and Hathaway redirected it past Jones to tie the game at 3-3 at 17:03, just 54 seconds after the Flyers took the lead.
With 1:12 left, Hathaway struck again. Hagelin got behind the Philly net on the forecheck, shook the puck away from Flyers defender Ivan Provorov and hit Hathaway in the slot. The big winger did the rest, firing it past Jones from point blank range to make it 4-3.
In the final minute, Carlson authored one of the longer empty-net goals you'll ever see, lifting the puck off the glass from below his own goal line. It bounded off the window and straight into the middle of the net to account for the 5-3 final, the Caps' third goal in a span of 2:08 against the suddenly stunned Flyers.
"Honestly, I don't even know what to say right now," says Philly coach Mike Yeo. "We played 57 minutes the way that we did, and you leave the game feeling that way. That's pretty tough.
"In some ways, you're thinking about the good things that we did and how we can be confident in going up against any team and knowing that even when we're short with players, when we play our team game the way we do, that we can have success. But we walk away with nothing here tonight."
Thursday's victory is Washington's fifth straight road win, and it comes ahead of a six-day break between games; the Caps will continue their road swing a week from tonight in New York against the Rangers.