There is always that phrase, “play a full 60 minutes.”
The Washington Capitals took that measure to
its full extreme, less 1.3 seconds, on Thursday night as Joel Ward scored with
that much time left on the clock in regulation time to give the Capitals a 2-1
win in Game 1 of their Eastern Conference semifinal series at Madison Square
Garden.
The game-winning play started innocently enough with Alex
Ovechkin skating the puck into the Ranger end.
He tried a curl and drag move, but the puck rolled off his stick where
Ryan McDonagh collected it. He was
unable to control it, though, and the puck slid into the corner to the left of
goalie Henrik Lundqvist. Dan Boyle skated
in to retrieve it for the Rangers, but he was checked hard against the glass by Nicklas
Backstrrom. The puck squirted free once
more, Ovechkin finding it below the Ranger goal line. He skated along the wall behind Lundqvist,
and as Derek Stepan closed on him, Ovechkin dropped the puck back for Joel Ward
trailing the play. Ward had nothing but
open ice in front of him, and he wasted no time getting off a shot that slid
under Lundqvist’s left pad and in to give the Caps a win in Game 1.
Before that it looked as if the teams would take their
battle to overtime, having exchanged single goals over the first 59 minutes. The Caps opened the scoring in the first
period on a power play simply executed.
John Carlson started the play skating out from behind his own net. As he reached his own blue line, Carlson sent
the puck up to Ovechkin along the left wing.
Ovechkin took the puck at the red line and skated down the wing, backing
off Boyle into the Ranger zone. Ovechkin
called his own number, wristing a shot through Boyle’s legs and over Lundqvist’s
blocker to give the Caps a 1-0 lead at the 18:13 mark of the first period.
That goal held up for almost 40 minutes, but the Rangers
tied the game late in the third period.
Capitalizing on pressure in the Caps’ end, Boyle retrieved a loose puck
in the corner to the left of goalie Braden Holtby and tried to center the
puck. Jay Beagle got a stick on it, but
not enough to clear the zone. Kevin
Hayes grabbed the puck high in the offensive zone and fired a shot through a
screen of bodies in front of Holtby. One
of those bodies was Jesper Fast, who redirected the puck past Holtby’s blocker
to tie the game at a goal apiece with just 4:39 left in regulation.
It might have been enough to send the contest into extra
time, but there was still the matter of there being 60 minutes in regulation,
and the Capitals used almost all of them to take Game 1.
Other stuff…
-- The Capitals are 2-5, all-time, when winning Game 1 of a
playoff series on the road. The last
time they won a Game 1 on the road was in 2003, a 3-0 win in Tampa. The Lightning won that series in six games.
-- The New York Rangers still do not have an answer for Alex
Ovechkin. This was the sixth straight
game in which Ovechkin scored a goal against the Blueshirts, dating back to January
2014.
-- In what might be the strangest Ovechkin statistic of the
night, he was one of three Capitals not credited with a hit. Marcus Johansson and Curtis Glencross were
the others.
-- Nicklas Backstrom had a “heavy” game. He tied for the team lead in hits with five
(with Tom Wilson).
-- The difference in Wilson’s five hits was that he compiled
than many in roughly half the ice time (10:07) as Backstrom (20:03).
-- The win was only Braden Holtby’s second in eight tries on
Madison Square Garden ice in the post season.
He beat the Rangers, 3-2, in Game 2 of the 2012 Eastern Conference
semifinals.
-- Game 1 was the first time this season that the Capitals
did not allow the Rangers to score in the first period. In fact, in three of the four games in the
regular season series the Rangers scored a pair of goals in the first
period. When the Caps shut out the
Rangers in the first period it broke a streak of five straight games in which
New York scored in the first period against Washington.
-- Four of the last six games for the Caps have ended in 2-1
scores, the Caps winning three of them. There
would have been a fifth but for an empty-net goal by Cal Clutterbuck in a 3-1
New York islanders win in Game six of the first round. Hey, it’s the playoffs.
-- Joel Ward scored on what would be his only shot of the
game. He had three misses, including one
off the post behind Lundqvist that might have rendered his late-game heroics
unnecessary.
-- How many times does a player go into a corner to retrieve
a puck, brace himself for the hit he knows is coming, takes it, and skates away
no worse for wear? Dan Boyle failing to
skate away from the hit he took from Nicklas Backstrom was the subtext of the
game-winning play. Was it “boarding?” Not as much as it was circumstance. But for the fact that there were less
than five seconds left in regulation, Boyle might have moved that puck along
the boards, turned away from the hit, and played on. However, he tried to freeze the puck for
those last few seconds, willing to take a hit to make sure that a loose puck
did not find its way to a Capital’s stick.
Backstrom finished the play the way players are taught.
In the end…
It’s first to “four,” not first to “one.” As nice as this win was, and it certainly
was, there is that last time the Caps held a 1-0 series lead on the road, the
result of a 3-0 shutout of the Tampa Bay Lightning in 2003. The Caps won Game 2 of that series, too, to
bring a 2-0 lead back to Washington, only to fritter it away, losing the next
four games. We do not mean to rain on
anyone’s parade here, but there isn’t any parade, yet, either.
All that aside, the Caps demonstrated that they can compete
with the Rangers and take the best they have to offer. And unless the Rangers can find an answer for
Alex Ovechkin, this could be a very difficult series for them.