It wasn’t always pretty, but at game’s end the Capitals banked two more points on Wednesday night at Capital One Arena. Facing the Philadelphia Flyers for the second time in as many nights, the Caps rode a great start, a pair of Connor McMichael goals and some timely saves from goaltender Logan Thompson to their fifth straight victory, a 6-3 win that was much closer than the final score would indicate.
The Flyers fell for the sixth straight game (0-5-1), but they did not go gently into the night after falling into a 4-0 ditch early in the second period.
“You’ve got to give them credit,” says Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery. “The [Travis Konecny] power-play goal gives them a little bit of life, and then they start to really push. When they start to push, they start to get a little bit reckless. And when I say reckless, I mean, now they're just full blow. They're not worried about what they give up at the one end, they're just worried about getting the puck back, and that gave us a lot of issues.
“And you could tell we were absolutely gassed, physically and mentally, [making] poor decisions and back on our heels. But you’ve got to give our guys a lot of credit to be able to dig in there in the third period. It was touch and go.”
After winning its Oct. 11 season opener, Philadelphia has fallen on hard times.
“We showed some life,” says Flyers’ coach John Tortorella. “ We started making some plays, and we started forechecking. And we at least had a little more zone time, so the second half of the game is a step in the right direction.”
Washington used a newly familiar formula to build that early lead. Following a D-to-D exchange at the Philly line, Dylan McIlrath put a shot toward the net, and Taylor Raddysh deftly redirected it past Flyers’ netminder Ivan Fedotov, giving the Caps a 1-0 lead at 4:50 of the first. The Caps have managed a number of recent goals on shots from the point with traffic and/or a deflection/redirection in front.
The Caps limited the Flyers to just three shots in the first. In the second, the Caps turned the jets on, but the Flyers turned the tables on them around the midpoint of the middle frame.
Washington went shorthanded for a second time in the opening minute of the middle period when Nic Dowd was boxed for holding. The Caps killed it off, and 22 seconds after exiting the box, Dowd lit the lamp for the second time in as many nights. Rasmus Sandin found Dowd in the high slot, and the veteran pivot threw a wrister through the five-hole to make it a 2-0 contest at 2:49.
McMichael continued to show off his early season shine, scoring a pair of goals just over three minutes apart. First, he put a nifty backhand finish on a breakaway goal at 4:04, as the Caps went the full 200 feet in mere seconds. McIlrath notched the first multi-point game of his NHL career in unorthodox fashion; he lost his footing deep in Washington ice, but still managed to make an indirect feed off the half wall to P-L Dubois. From there, Dubois made a sublime backhand sauce feed to McMichael, whose finish came 75 seconds after the Dowd goal.
On his next shift, McMichael redirected a Trevor van Riemsdyk center point shot past Fedotov, the Caps’ third goal in a span of four shots and 4 minutes and 27 seconds of playing time. It marked the Caps’ third three-goal second period in their last three home games.
Washington blueliners contributed on all four of those goals; the Caps’ defense corps has amassed four goals and 18 points in just six games thus far this season.
The rest of the period served as a reminder of how difficult it is to win consecutive games against the same team. Having been outscored 8-1 in the two games to that point, the Flyers summoned some moxie and dominated much of the remainder of the game.
By the midpoint of the second, Thompson had faced only seven shots on the night. Philly finally broke through on a power play, getting on the board at 12:04 of the second on a Konecny short side shot from just above the goal line on the right side.
Just over four minutes later, Owen Tippett shrunk the lead by another goal with a shot from the left circle, the only 5-on-5 goal the Flyers managed to score during this back-to-back set with the Capitals.
Washington seemed to have regained its footing, and it put together a dominant offensive zone shift in which it executed a full personnel change. But when the Caps lost control of the puck, Flyers’ center Morgan Frost – at the end of a 96-second shift – tore off on a breakaway and took a shot, and he believed he had beaten Thompson to pull Philly within a goal with less than two minutes remaining in the frame; the goal light came on, albeit belatedly.
Video review showed that Thompson had managed to smother the puck beneath his body in the crease, but Philly came right back and poured another five shots on Thompson in a span of 10 seconds. The Caps’ goalie held firm, crucially preserving that two-goal cushion going into the third.
With the two teams playing 4-on-4 hockey early in the third period, Philly went on a 4-on-3 power play of 20 seconds in duration. Nineteen seconds later, Flyers’ rookie phenom Matvei Michkov fired a shot home from the high slot at 6:36, making it a 4-3 contest with plenty of time remaining.
“Obviously, going up 4-0 is always nice,” says Thompson. “But you know that team with that coach over there, that they're not going to give up. And credit to them, they didn’t, and they made some plays, and they're back in the game.”
The Caps’ defense bent but didn’t break, and Thompson made key third-period stops on ex-Cap Garnet Hathaway from in tight, and he also stopped a Frost wraparound bid with his left skate, a situation in which he may not have known where the puck was.
Frost aided the Washington cause by taking an unwise offensive zone penalty with just under five minutes remaining, allowing the Caps a couple of minutes of breathing room. Late in the contest, both Dubois and Alex Ovechkin bagged empty-net goals to salt away the Caps’ fifth consecutive victory, matching their longest winning streak of last season.
“We’re probably not going to go 81-1,” says Dubois. “But you want to ride the waves as long as you can. It’s not perfect. Tonight wasn’t perfect. Last game wasn’t perfect. None of the games were perfect, but to find a way to win the games, that’s what top teams do.
“We want to get there; it’s a long season and there’s a lot to do. But these points are just as valuable as the points in March.”
