Caps Host Knights
Caps make quick stop at home to take on Vegas Golden Knights on Tuesday
After playing four straight games on the road to close out the October portion of their schedule, the Capitals make a quick stop at home on Tuesday night to play host to the Vegas Golden Knights. For Washington, Tuesday's tilt is the second of back-to-back games; the Caps dropped a 3-2 shootout decision to the Hurricanes in Carolina on Monday.
Washington ended October with a 5-4-1 mark, going 5-2-1 in its last eight games after opening the season with consecutive losses on its first set of back-to-backs this season. The Caps posted a 2-1-1 mark on the road since their last home game here on Oct. 22, a 4-3 come-from-behind win over the Los Angeles Kings. Washington is 3-1-0 on home ice this season, and it will carry a three-game home winning streak into Tuesday's tilt with Vegas.
After falling behind 1-0 in the first on Monday in Carolina, the Caps battled back to take a 2-1 lead on Dylan Strome's second goal of the season and Alex Ovechkin's fifth of the campaign in the middle period. But the Canes evened it up ahead of the second intermission, and the Caps had to claw and scrape just to get the single point. Carolina frequently swarmed the Capitals in their own end, and although Washington spent far more time in the defensive zone than it would have liked, it defended hard and it defended well.
"I really liked how the guys were playing tonight," said Caps goalie Darcy Kuemper in the wake of Monday's shootout setback. "This is a tough building to come into, and you've got to be able to weather storms when they get momentum, and I thought we did a really good job of that."
Although the Caps controlled only 38.71% of all shot attempts at 5-on-5, the Canes' edge in high danger scoring chances was much tighter, at 7-6. Washington also faced a season high six shorthanded situations, killing off each of the last five, including one in the final two minutes of regulation and another in overtime.
"I think Darcy and our PK was outstanding," says Strome. "They obviously got that first one in the first period, but they locked it down the rest of the game and usually your goalie has to be your best penalty killer, and I thought that was the case.
"All of them did a great job, though. I know they've been focused on it a lot and dialing it in, and I thought they were really, really good tonight."
Washington spent 11 minutes and 12 seconds of the game shorthanded, and Kuemper stopped 12 of 13 shots he faced on the Carolina man advantage. The only shot to get behind him was a Stefan Noesen deflection of a Brent Burns point shot early in the first on the Canes' first power play of the evening.
The Caps played Monday's game without the services of both defenseman John Carlson and right wing T.J. Oshie, both of whom left Saturday's game in Nashville with lower body injuries in the first period. Carlson is day-to-day while Oshie is out indefinitely.
Already missing Nicklas Backstrom and Tom Wilson, the Caps' power play struggled with zone entries on Monday, but did manage to get the go-ahead goal from Ovechkin on a power play late in the second, with Erik Gustafsson filling in up top for Carlson and putting the puck on a tee for the Caps' captain.
Ovechkin's goal was the 265th go-ahead goal of his career, putting him ahead of Brett Hull (264) for the most in NHL history.
By night's end, Carolina held a lopsided 74-33 advantage in shot attempts at all strengths, another indication of how hard the Caps had to work to scrape even a single point out of Monday's game. In Carlson's absence, Dmitry Orlov (26:18), Nick Jensen (26:02) and Martin Fehervary (23:35) logged a lot of hard minutes for Washington. Jensen's ice time figure from Monday's game was his highest ever in his 227 games in a Caps sweater, the second game in a row he has achieved that distinction. He skated 25:25 in Saturday's game in Nashville.
"I don't think there was anything wrong with the effort tonight," said Caps center Lars Eller afterwards. "We battled hard, everybody did. We had a lot of big penalty kills to keep us in the game, the power play came through with one and it just comes down to a shootout. Sometimes you're on the right side of it, sometimes you're not. But we might as well have walked out of here with two [points].
Having such a game on the front end of a back-to-back is far from ideal, but the Caps will deal with what's in front of them at 7 p.m. tonight when the puck drops.
"You're not thinking about it during [Monday's] game," says Eller, asked about the difficulty of a game like that on the front end of a back-to-back. "We're used to it. We'll recap and be ready [Tuesday] at 7."
The Golden Knights are the class of the Western Conference in the early going, rolling up 16 points in their first 10 games, four more than any other team in the conference. Vegas isn't blowing anybody out, but they've been getting an early jump on opponents and they've been extremely stingy defensively.
Each of the Golden Knights' two losses to date came by identical 3-2 scores, one at home and one on the road. Vegas has permitted an average of just 1.7 goals per game, the lowest rate in the League by far. The Knights have outscored the opposition by a combined total of 12-2 in first periods this season, and among all NHL teams, only Boston (329:41) has had the lead for more time than Vegas (293:13) thus far this season.
