Tom Wilson snapped a 1-1 tie with 4:45 left in the third period, registering his 300th career point and giving the Caps their first lead of the game on Sunday afternoon against the San Jose Sharks at Capital One Arena. The Caps got a late empty-net goal from Evgeny Kuznetsov to salt away a 3-1 win over San Jose, Washington’s third straight victory and its first set of consecutive triumphs on home ice in calendar 2023.
Sunday’s victory wasn’t pretty, but the result was two points, and victors need never apologize for winning. For the Capitals right now, those two points are all that matters. They’ve finished the October portion of their schedule with a modest winning streak, and they’ll start November with what passes for a winning record (4-3-1) in the modern NHL.
“It hasn’t been easy,” says Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery. “It’s not easy to win in this League, as everybody knows. So when you string three wins together – however they look, shootouts, comebacks, whatever it is – we’re gaining some momentum in our season, and now we have a few days to regroup here and get ready for another tough stretch.”
Credit to the Sharks, who remain winless through nine games (0-8-1) this season; San Jose concluded a fruitless five-game road trip here today, but it gave the Caps all they could handle.
“There was more swagger to our game,” says Sharks’ coach David Quinn. “I think they understood the situation; we weren’t going to play for [the next] four days, and we’ve had some bad taste in our mouth from this trip. We wanted to make sure that when we got on the plane tonight, we had a good taste in our mouth. Unfortunately, we don’t, but there was some good to take out of it.”
For the seventh time in eight October games, the Caps yielded the game’s first goal. Just past the midpoint of the first period, San Jose’s Luke Kunin scored at the right post, displaying deft hands to take the puck off the back wall and quickly tuck it between the pipe and Caps’ goalie Darcy Kuemper.
Kunin’s goal gave San Jose a 1-0 lead at 11:40, and it also ended San Jose’s longest goal drought in over 16 years. Kunin’s goal halted that dry spell at 163 minutes and 10 seconds, the equivalent of more than eight periods.
The Sharks managed to generate some offensive zone time over the rest of the game, and they weren’t shy about getting and bringing pucks to the net, but Kuemper stopped 29 of 30 shots – the Sharks’ second highest shot output of the season – he faced on the afternoon to notch his third victory of the season.
Although the Sharks have scuffled mightily to score goals this season, they entered Sunday’s game as the League’s top face-off team with a 55.8 percent success rate on the dot. Compare that to Washington’s 44.1 percent rate coming into Sunday’s tilt; the Caps ranked 31st at the beginning of the afternoon, ahead of only Chicago (39 percent).
But the Caps – and Dylan Strome in particular – put on a clinic, especially in the offensive zone. By game’s end, Washington’s advantage in draws was slight; the Caps won 32 of 61 (52 percent) on the afternoon. Strome finished the game with 21 face-off wins in 27 tries (78 percent), and he won 17 of 21 (81 percent) in the offensive zone.
Strome and his linemates – Wilson and Alex Ovechkin – used those draw wins and resulting offensive zone time to pump 15 pucks on the San Jose net on Sunday, teeing up 25 shots altogether.
Strome’s line accounted for each of Washington’s goals, and those repeated draw wins in the offensive zone gave the Caps a slew of shots at the San Jose net, putting pressure on the Sharks’ beleaguered defense. Eventually – in the third period – the Caps were able to slip a couple behind Sharks’ goalie Mackenzie Blackwood.
“Face-offs were a big, big problem for us, tonight,” laments Quinn. “We lost key draws, and our coverage just was not good off face-offs. We had to give four or five chances off of face-offs, which is just inexcusable.”
Whenever one team’s coach is unhappy with his team’s performance on the draw, the other is typically thrilled.
“You could feel that, because we continued to generate,” says Carbery of his team’s face-off prowess. “And it wasn’t just an [offensive] zone win, it was an [offensive] zone win, and then the puck was getting to the net. So that’s where you kept lining up and kept going back to the same spot.
“The pressure and the attacks that we were getting off those draws was starting to become a factor in the momentum of the game.”
Like the game itself, neither of the Washington goals will end up on a highlight reel. Strome notched his team-leading sixth of the season at 2:18 of the third to knot the game at 1-1. Strome’s shot from center point had eyes, meandering through a screen and through Blackwood’s five-hole.
“I love that goal,” says Carbery. “It’s sort of a knuckler, and it catches Blackwood a little bit off guard, but it was the whole point of what we talked about in between the second and the third period, getting that puck to middle ice in the offensive zone, and it's such a more dangerous shot than something that goes [defenseman] to [defenseman], or righties sifting it in, like you saw a bunch of those tonight.
“But if you get to the top, and you're shooting from there, now all sorts of good things can happen, from a rebound standpoint, from dead on shot with the goaltender. So I love the sequence, and then he gets rewarded for getting to a good spot.”
Wilson’s goal was even uglier; in the midst of a goal mouth scramble, he issued a backhander from below the goal line and it bounded off Sharks’ blueliner Kyle Burroughs and in, giving the Caps a lead they would not relinquish. Wilson’s goal was a result of the direct pressure of winning draws in San Jose ice; four of the five Sharks on the ice at the time had been out for more than a minute.
“That puck was bouncing everywhere,” recounts Wilson. “You’re just trying to get it towards the net, and you’ve got to make your own breaks in that type of game, against a desperate team coming in. We worked hard and stuck with it, and got it done. Got a bounce finally, and got one.”
