Caps Reach End of Road
Caps play final road game of 2022-23 on Tuesday night in Boston
A night after putting a serious crimp in Islanders' playoff hopes in New York's penultimate game of the season on Monday night in Washington, the Caps take to the road for the final time in 2022-23. They'll travel to Boston for their own penultimate game of the season, a Tuesday night tilt against the Bruins that also concludes the Caps' final set of back-to-back games.
Monday's win ended a six-game winless stretch (0-5-1) for the Capitals, who suffered an excruciating late loss on Saturday against Florida in a spirited bid to spoil the Panthers' playoff hopes.
Darcy Kuemper made 38 saves to earn Monday's win , blanking the Islanders for nearly 55 minutes before New York finally broke the spell with a pair of late tallies, both of which were offset by a tandem of Washington empty-net goals in the game's final five minutes.
Kuemper had the luxury of early offensive support - the Caps scored twice in the game's first 63 seconds and scored three times in the first period - and he got solid defensive support as well, in the form of 27 blocked shots from 15 different Capitals.
It wasn't always pretty; the Caps spent much of the evening defending longer and tougher than they would have liked.
"The guys were digging in, from a sacrifice standpoint," says Caps' coach Peter Laviolette. "Inside of defense and what it takes to be good defensively, you've got to block shots. And I thought guys paid the price with regard to that. Also, it came from everybody; it wasn't just one group. There wasn't a lot of line matching going on out there.
"[The Islanders] are three deep with their lines, and they're capable offensively. And their fourth line generates a lot as well, just from the way they play the game. They put a lot of pucks at the net, and people. So we probably played a little more defense than we would have liked to, but inside of that I thought that we protected the front of the net a little bit better. We paid the price blocking shots, and Darcy made big saves when we needed them."
Dylan Strome scored the game's first goal and its last, setting a personal single-season standard of 23 in the process. Strome has the most goals by a first-year Capital since T.J. Oshie netted 26 goals in 2015-16.
Signed to a one-year contract last summer, Strome has parlayed that pact into a five-year extension signed in February. He has 26 points (11 goals, 15 assists) in his last 20 games, tied for 18th in the NHL over that span.
"I feel good, I feel confident," says Strome. "Like I said after signing the contract, I can breathe a little bit more and you know you're gonna be here for a while, and just relax and let your instincts take over and not worry about the outside noise. I've obviously never had the chance to play with that.
"Like I told [the Caps] when I signed, I want to continue to get better each and every year, and hopefully that leads to us making the playoffs at some point. That's obviously the goal, and every hockey player's goal is to get that chance to win the Stanley Cup. So hopefully we can get a chance to play for one next year."
Way back on Oct. 12 in D.C., the Caps opened their ill-fated and injury riddled '22-23 season at home against the Bruins, a 5-2 defeat that turned out to be the first in an NHL record number of victories for Boston this season. With a 5-3 triumph over the Flyers in Philly on Sunday, the Bruins pushed the '95-96 Detroit Red Wings and the 2018-19 Tampa Bay Lightning out of the record books. Both of those clubs won 62 games, and Boston now has 63 victories with two games to go.
Having clinched the Presidents' Trophy as the NHL's best regular season club long ago, the Bruins now have two games remaining in which to erase one more long-standing mark from the NHL's ledger. The 1976-77 Montreal Canadiens established a League standard with 132 points when they rolled up a remarkable 60-8-12 record and went on to win the second of four consecutive Stanley Cup championships. If they are able to win just one of its last two games, the Bruins will nudge the Habs aside and will claim that record for their own, too.
