Gustav Forsling departed Florida’s previous game with an injury and did not return, but he was pronounced good to go at the Panthers’ Saturday morning skate. Hours later, Forsling supplied the overtime game-winner for his club, firing a one-timer past Caps’ goalie Charlie Lindgren from the right circle with 1:19 remaining in the extra session to give the Panthers a 3-2 victory.
For 55 minutes or so on Saturday at Florida’s Amerant Bank Arena, the Caps did everything necessary to take two points on the road from one of the NHL’s elite teams. But a tough defensive zone shift – one of the very few the Caps experienced on this night against the hard forechecking Panthers – ultimately put them on a late penalty kill, and Sasha Barkov deflected Carter Verhaeghe’s high slot shot home for the tying tally on the power play with 3:30 left in regulation.
That late tying goal set the table for Forsling’s overtime heroics, which gave Florida its 11th victory in 13 games while ending Washington’s winning run at three. Sam Bennett, who was robbed by Lindgren on multiple occasions in Saturday’s game, found his way onto the scoresheet by teeing up Forsling’s game-winner.
“The ending was tough, because we did a lot of good things through that game,” laments Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery. “It’s real tight; there’s not much going on either way. Both teams were really structured; there wasn’t a ton of Grade A’s on either side.”
“We’re pissed off,” says Caps winger Tom Wilson, who drew the penalties that led to Washington’s two power play goals, and who scored the second of them. “Not good. I feel like we could have won that game.”
That feeling is understandable. The Caps went toe-to-toe with the beasts of the Eastern Conference and held their own all the way.
Over much of the game, the Caps seemed snake-bitten and in need of a good bounce or two. Washington squandered a pair of first-period power play opportunities, and in the second, the Caps narrowly missed denting Florida goaltender Anthony Stolarz on three other bids; Dylan Strome rang iron behind the big netminder twice – early in the first and early in the second – and Pierrick Dubé hit the right post behind Stolarz in the middle period. In the third, Anthony Mantha ripped a rocket of a shot from the high slot that also drew iron.
Mantha departed the game with an undisclosed injury in the third; the fourth consecutive game in which a Washington regular was unable to finish the contest due to injury.
Early in the second, the Panthers drew first blood when Nick Cousins deflected a Dmitry Kulikov right point shot past Lindgren for a 1-0 Florida lead at 4:03.
When Tom Wilson was hooked as he drove to the net late in the second, the Caps went to a power play for a third time. Washington was able to square the score on that third opportunity when Rasmus Sandin made a sublime feed to set up Sonny Milano for a back door tap in at 18:31.
“Pacioretty made a good play across to Sandy,” recounts Milano. “And I knew Sandy was going to get it back to me, so I got open. Those two made good plays.”
Milano’s goal put the Caps in a position where if they could win the third period, they’d pick up a pair of points. They almost pulled it off.
In a taut, tight physical affair where both teams had to work to get good looks at the opposing net, the Caps kept the game even with a successful penalty kill early in the third. When Wilson drew another call midway through the third, Washington was finally able to secure its first lead of the game.
Seeing that Wilson had a step on the Florida penalty killers, Strome alertly threw the puck deep from his own side of the red line, betting that Wilson would get to it first to negate icing. That proved to be a good bet, and the big winger went one better when he carved toward the cage and tucked a backhander through Stolarz for a 2-1 Washington lead at 10:11 of the third.
With less than five minutes left, the Caps got hemmed and Lindgren bailed them out with a series of stellar saves, but Nick Jensen was boxed for hooking, putting the Panthers on the power play with the game on the line.
“He always [battles],” says Pacioretty of another gritty, gutsy performance in goal from Lindgren. “You know when he’s in the net that he’s going to give it his all. Tonight was another example of that. He played really, really well and gave us the opportunity to win two points.”
Florida’s power play recently ended a streak of 10 straight games with a goal, a torrid stretch in which it struck for 16 extra-man goals. The Caps did a good job on the Cats’ extra-man unit on Saturday, right up until Barkov evened the game late in the third.
Bennett started the scoring play on the game-winner by stripping the puck from Milano high in the Florida zone, and he then carried into Washington ice and issued the set-up feed to Forsling.
“A little chaos there in overtime, as usual,” says Forsling. “I saw Benny grab the puck, and I felt pretty fresh – my legs. It was my first shift in overtime, so I had legs. Benny made an unreal pass.”
Saturday marked the Caps’ fifth straight setback in overtime or the shootout; the Caps’ last victory beyond 60n minutes came back on Dec. 21 in Columbus when Alex Ovechkin scored the game-winner in overtime.
“We played a really good game,” says Pacioretty. “And we know that we’ve been playing some good hockey lately, and lost some really key players, and have had that next man up mentality. We really dug in and battled today, and we felt like we deserved that extra point. But that’s the way it goes sometimes. We don’t have time now to sit back and worry about that. We’ve got to focus on the process and trying to win the next game.”
