Caps Roll Over Hawks, 6-1

It took 73 games, but the Caps were finally able to get the band back together on Thursday night at Capital One Arena. With the return of defenseman John Carlson to the lineup following a three-month absence with a fractured skull, all six remaining members of Washington's 2017-18 Stanley Cup championship team finally took to the ice in the same game for the first time in the 2022-23 season.

The returns were immediate and positive, as the Caps rolled to a 6-1 victory over the visiting Chicago Blackhawks. Carlson, Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom each had a goal and an assist to pace the attack, with both Carlson and Backstrom scoring on the power play. Washington's penalty-killing outfit was on its game as well, snuffing out all five Chicago power plays on the evening.
Not only did the Caps have all six remaining members of their '17-18 Cup team together for the first time this season, they also had their likely group of 2023-24 top six defensemen on the ice for the first time as well. In limiting the Hawks to a single goal on the night, Washington also ended a stretch of 10 straight home games in which it permitted three or more goals against.
"I thought the special teams were really good," says Caps' coach Peter Laviolette. "Obviously the power play was good, and the penalty kill was really good. There was some back-to-back-to-back kills early on in the game where the penalty kill had the step up and do a job, so I thought that they were good.
"It's nice to have [goaltender Darcy Kuemper] healthy and back. It was nice to have Carly healthy and back, and to have [Trevor van Riemsdyk] back in the lineup [following the birth of his son earlier in the week]. So that's kind of the first glance at our [defense] corps; we just haven't had it. We've been missing one, two, three, or four guys out of the lineup with it, and so to get those guys back and put everybody back in the right seats on the bus I think was really important. And it shows in the game, it shows on the power play, it shows on the specialty teams, the penalty kill, and it shows on 5-on-5 play. It was nice to have that on the bench, and to be able to roll that out there."
Playing in the NHL for the first time in more than 14 months and playing for the first time at any level since Feb. 3, veteran Chicago goaltender Anton Khudobin was understandably rusty in his own return to action on Thursday. The Caps took advantage of that rust when Khudobin put a pizza right on Conor Sheary's stick at 10:15 of the opening frame and the Washington winger potted the "gimme" goal - his second in as many games - for a 1-0 Caps lead.
Eighteen seconds later, the Caps doubled that advantage. Four seconds after an Evgeny Kuznetsov face-off win in the offensive zone, Anthony Mantha made it 2-0 with a wrist shot from the slot.
The Caps killed off a pair of penalties in the first and took that 2-0 lead to the room at first intermission.
Early in the second, the Caps increased their lead to 3-0 on a Nic Dowd goal, also his second in as many games. Aliaksei Protas lugged the puck into Chicago ice and made a perfect feed to Dowd, who beat Khudobin with a wrist shot from the left circle at 1:27.
Just ahead of the midpoint of the middle period, Backstrom potted one from the slot on the power play at 8:10 to increase the Caps' cushion to 4-0.
With Washington again on the power play early in the third, Carlson floated a shot to the back of the net from center point, extending the Caps' lead to 5-0 at 1:04 of the final frame. The goal was Carlson's ninth of the season, and his third on the power play. He has accounted for all three power-play goals from Washington defensemen this season.
Returning from a much shorter absence of just two games, Kuemper was also sharp on Thursday. The lone blemish on his sheet came a couple of minutes after the Carlson goal when Chicago's Nikita Zaitsev put a seeing eye shot through traffic and into the net at 3:08 of the third, spoiling the shutout bid and interrupting the Caps' string of five straight lamplighters.
With just over five minutes remaining in the game, the big man got loose and tore off on a breakaway. Ovechkin beat Khudobin at 14:56, closing out the scoring for the night with his 41st goal of the season, and his fourth in two games against the Hawks in '22-23.
In his first game action in three months, Carlson logged 19:36 in ice time, including 4:23 on the power play. He entered the game leading all NHL defensemen with an average of 4:21 a night in extra man time. Carlson was given the night off from the rigors of penalty-killing work; those chores were handled adeptly by Martin Fehervary (4:58), Alex Alexeyev (4:46), van Riemsdyk (4:36) and Nick Jensen (4:24).
"Probably better than I thought, but still not very good," was Carlson's assessment of how he felt in his return. There's a lot of plays there - even the simplest of plays sometimes - that kind of sneak up on you, and also they make you feel like crap more because you know how simple or easy they are.
"Obviously I wasn't expecting to play a perfect game; no one ever does. But it was nice to be back under fire."
"We missed him," says Kuemper of Carlson. "In my position, I definitely missed him out there. We've been watching all the hard work he's been putting in to get back, and to see someone go through something so scary and then make a comeback like that, and then have that performance was pretty special."