As the late, great Warren Zevon might have sang of the Caps’ 3-2 win over the Philadelphia Flyers on Thursday night at Capital One Arena, “Ain’t That Pretty at All.” And it certainly wasn’t pretty; it was one of the least impressive of Washington’s 46 victories this season. But it’s also the one that got them to the 100-point plateau on the season, and it helped secure their berth in the 2025 Stanley Cup playoffs.
Washington's win combined with other events in later games officially lifts the Caps into the postseason. They're the first team since at least 1979-80 – the League does not have complete data prior to that – to go from being the last team to make the playoffs one season to being the first to secure their postseason berth in the following season.
Oh, yeah. Alex Ovechkin scored the game’s first goal, leaving himself seven goals shy of surpassing Wayne Gretzky’s career goals mark of 894 with 13 more games remaining on Washington’s schedule.
Charlie Lindgren was Washington’s best player tonight, stopping 27 shots – 15 of them in a frenzied third period – to notch his 16th victory of the season and his fifth in his last seven starts.
“I honestly didn’t think we were very good from start to finish,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “We were okay [in the ] first and second. We get the early lead and there were some good moments in the first two periods, and in the third it obviously came right off the rails. But I didn’t feel comfortable all night. We were giving up way too much, too loose, and their transition was picking us apart at times.”
Just ahead of the 15-minute mark of the first frame, the fans got what they came to see. A dozen seconds after P-L Dubois won an offensive-zone draw, Aliaksei Protas picked up the rebound of a blocked Trevor van Riemsdyk point shot, and he finessed a feed to Ovechkin, who clanked it into the cage for career goal No. 888, staking the Caps to a 1-0 lead at 14:25.
“It was a great play,” says Ovechkin of the Protas pass. “Take it, and move on.”
Early in the second, the Caps doubled their lead. At the end of his shift, Dylan Strome made a strong play on the forecheck, beating Flyers blueliner Jamie Drysdale to the puck and rolling it back behind the Philly net for Anthony Beauvillier. Beauvillier put it to Matt Roy at the right point, and Roy fired a drive that Brandon Duhaime expertly tipped past Samuel Ersson for his eighth goal of the season.
Duhaime’s goal made it 2-0 at 1:56.
Just after the midpoint of the middle frame, Beauvillier started another scoring play after Philly flubbed a 3-on-2 rush with an errant feed high in Washington ice. Beauvillier collected the puck at the Caps’ line, then took off on a 2-on-1 with Andrew Mangiapane, and with Jakob Chychrun as the trailer in the center lane.
With options, Beauvillier chose correctly, perfectly feeding Mangiapane on the left side. No. 88 ripped a shot past Ersson on the stick side to make it a 3-0 game at 11:06.
“It was a great play,” says Mangiapane. “Everyone was kind of backchecking there, and the [defense] disrupted it there, and it quickly turned up. Beau made a great pass to me, and I just wanted to get it off as quickly as possible there.”
Washington’s lone deadline day acquisition, Beauvillier was moved around a bit in Thursday’s game, but he made a pair of nice plays to pick up assists with two sets of different linemates.
“I thought this was his best game for sure,” says Carbery. “Noticeable, and his teammates notice as well. He was all around the puck and did a real good job for us.”
At this stage of the game, it looked like it might turn into a laugher; Philadelphia had managed just seven shots on net, and it was approaching 180 consecutive minutes without a goal.
The Caps – the NHL’s best third-period team – carried that 3-0 cushion into the period. But tonight’s third period looked more like one of Washington’s first periods during its five-agem homestand earlier in the month. Just after the five-minute mark of the third, the Flyers broke that lengthy scoring drought at 191 minutes and 9 seconds when Ryan Poehling chipped one past Lindgren from just above the paint, an unassisted goal that made it a 3-1 game at 5:10 of the third.
That’s when things started to get weird.
Sixty-two seconds after the Poehling goal, it appeared that John Carlson had restored the three-goal cushion, sneaking to the back door on the weak side to convert a precision Nic Dowd feed after Dowd and linemates Duhaime and Beauvillier won a prolonged puck battle in the corner.
Flyers coach John Tortorella called his timeout to consider the situation before issuing a coach’s challenge, alleging that Beauvillier had made a surreptitious hand pass in the corner ahead of the goal. After a lengthy review that threatened last call at the local watering holes, the stripes agreed and took the goal off the board.
Carlson has now had five goals taken off the board via coach’s challenges this season, one more than he has scored.
Minutes after that, Lindgren made one of his best stops of the game to deny a Travis Konecny backhander from in tight. Later on the same shift, Konecny and Matvei Michkov combined to flub a 2-on-none opportunity; the glorious look failed to even produce a shot on net.
Meanwhile, the Caps hardly had the puck in the third and were rarely in the offensive zone with it. They were credited with just two third-period shots on net, a 36-footer from Ovechkin in the first minute of the frame and a 30-footer from Tom Wilson in the 14th minute. The Caps finished with just 16 shots on net; Washington improves to 5-2-1 this season when registering fewer than 20 shots on goal. Two of those five wins have come at Philadelphia’s expense.
With Ersson pulled for an extra attacker, Flyers captain Sean Couturier jammed a loose puck in the paint into the net with 2:36 remaining. It was ruled “no goal” on the ice, but Tortorella issued a second successful challenge; it was ruled that Lindgren did not have the puck covered and secured, and it was fair game for Couturier, whose goal cut the cushion to one.
Way back in October, Washington opened up a 4-0 lead over the Flyers here in the back half of a home-and home set, only to watch Philly battle back and make it a 4-3 game in the third. A pair of late empty-netters relieved the pressure that night, allowing the Caps to escape with a 6-3 win.
Tonight, they needed Lindgren to make a couple more late saves to secure a one-goal win, their eighth victory in their last nine games.
“They started to throw more rubber at the net,” says Lindgren of the third period. “All year long when we’ve played Philly, they’re a really good offensive team. They maybe don’t have a lot of shot volume in the games we play them, but they tend to generate a lot of good scoring chances.
“They’re a high skilled team, fast, and good in transition. You definitely saw that on display in the third period. They didn’t roll over, and you tip your cap.”
Philadelphia falls to 2-8-1 in its last 11; the Flyers’ ongoing five-game road trip continues to Dallas, Chicago and Toronto.
“We struggled a little bit in the second; I thought we were sloppy with the puck,” says Tortorella. “We kept plugging away.”
