Three nights after playing in his 800th career NHL game, ex-Caps defenseman Dmitry Orlov bit the hand that once fed him, scoring a pair of goals to hand his former team a 4-2 setback on Sunday at Lenovo Center in Raleigh. Orlov, who played 686 games in a Washington sweater, opened the scoring in the first period and scored what would prove to be the game-winning goal early in the second period.
Playing for the second time in as many nights, the Caps weren’t able to find an equalizer in the 34 minutes of playing time remaining after Orlov’s second goal made it a 3-2 contest. Carolina effectively stymied the Caps’ offense from that point forward, taking away time and space and making the Caps already heavy legs feel even heavier with their speed and pressure.
“The game’s not close,” says Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery. “But give our guys credit; we fought. Obviously the game was what it was; we were in our end for probably – whatever it was – 75 percent of the game.”
Prior to Sunday’s game, Carbery discussed the need for the Capitals – who played on Saturday night in DC – to weather the early storm against the Hurricanes in their building. Thanks to a number of key stops from Charlie Lindgren in the Washington nets, the Caps managed to get through the first 14 minutes cleanly enough, but old friend Orlov changed that at 14:01, finding the back of the net with a short side shot through traffic from the left circle, a shot that appeared to glance off Lindgren’s catching glove and in.
“I have no idea how the first [Orlov goal] went in, to be honest with you,” says Lindgren. “Both those [Orlov] goals, I wish I had, so that’s what’s frustrating. The first one, I’m scratching my head. I’m like, ‘How does it go in my glove and out of my glove?’ It just doesn’t make sense. But that’s hockey.”
Seconds after Orlov lifted the Canes to a 1-0 advantage, P-L Dubois drew a hooking call on Carolina’s Andrei Svechnikov. The ensuing Washington man advantage produced a couple of decent looks – including a couple tip-in tries from the slot – but no tying tally.
Late in the first frame, the Canes found themselves in some serious penalty soup when both Shayne Gostisbehere and Martin Necas were boxed for minors on the same sequence, giving the Caps a full two-minute two-man advantage. The first three quarters of that two-man advantage weren’t very pretty, but with 15 ticks left on the penalties and just 44 seconds left in the first, John Carlson put one on a tee for Alex Ovechkin, who blasted a shot past Pyotr Kochetkov from his left dot office to square the score at 1-1.
The Caps’ captain’s goal was his seventh of the season and No. 860 of his NHL career.
But the Caps – who have shown an early season propensity for striking multiple times quickly – weren’t done yet. After Nic Dowd won a draw at the Carolina line with 31.9 seconds left in the first, the Dowd trio put some forechecking heat on the Hurricanes’ top trio deep in Carolina ice. Dowd was able to squeeze off a shot from in tight, and Kochetkov made the stop, but the puck fell to the paint, and Brandon Duhaime was right there to sweep it over the line for a 2-1 Washington lead with 10.7 seconds left in the opening period.
Duhaime’s goal marked the sixth time in 11 games this season the Caps have netted a pair of goals less than a minute apart.
Unfortunately for Washington, that was its high-water mark of the night. Carolina quickly tied the game and then regained the lead, doing so before the first television timeout of the middle frame.
Washington was guilty of an inopportune line change; the Caps didn’t get the puck deep enough in the Carolina end – a problem for them all night – and the Canes quickly and alertly turned the play in the other direction as Washington’s fresh troops tried in vain to catch up.
From the half wall in Carolina ice, Jesperi Kotkaniemi went to Eric Robinson, who was at the Washington line on the opposite side of the rink. Robinson pushed it ahead to space where Necas was able to reach it for a short ice breakaway. He tucked a backhander under the bar at 2:29, knotting the score at 2-2.
Just under three minutes later, Carolina had the lead back on Orlov’s second goal of the night. This time, the longtime Caps’ blueliner was locked and loaded for a tee-up from Necas, and he drilled a shot past Lindgren’s outstretched glove hand from the very top of the right circle at 5:26.
Washington had to kill off two penalties to get to the third period down just the one goal, and it needed several excellent stops from Lindgren to pull it off. The Caps’ goalie stopped 15 shots in as many minutes after the second Orlov goal, a span in which the Caps managed only two harmless shots of their own.
The front half of the third period brought more of the same; all Washington seemed to be able to do with regularity was to shorten the ice for Carolina’s lethal transition game. Fortunately for the Capitals, Lindgren was the freshest looking player in a white sweater, and he kept his team within a single puck of the Canes. Svechnikov’s empty-net goal in the final 10 seconds of regulation accounts for the 4-2 final.
In a span of 23 minutes of playing time immediately following the second Orlov goal, the Caps generated only four shots on net – one of them from 179 feet away while they were shorthanded. Washington was able to generate a bit more offensive zone time in the final 10 or 11 minutes of the third, but no lamplighters.
“They're a good team,” says Dowd of the Canes. “It’s a tough building to play in. We've had a lot of history against each other, at least since I've been here. It's always a war. You know they're a high shot volume team. At times, the shots are a little skewed, because they're shooting from absolutely everywhere. But also, that plays into their system and it makes them very effective.
“I thought Chucky played incredible tonight. I know he's going to be upset at himself, but I thought he was our best player; he gave us a chance to stay in that game. And going into the third down by one against a tough team and a tough building on a back-to-back, I thought we put ourselves in a good spot.”
