The Caps are currently riding a nine-game winning streak, and have once again taken over the top spot in the NHL. It’s been an impressive run, to say the least, but it hasn’t been without its difficulties – particularly recently. Whether it was huge comeback victories against last year’s Eastern Conference Finalists to a physically taxing home-and-home series against a team much tougher than their place in the standings would imply, the Caps have by no means sailed through this streak.
While so many of the victories – during the streak and over the first half of the season overall – have proven that this team is both resilient and capable of winning in multiple different ways, last night’s win over the visiting Sabres stands out as perhaps the gutsiest of any of them.
This game just featured so many moments that could have caused the Caps to get frustrated or distracted, that could have caused them to just pack it in and give up… things that might have led past incarnations of this team to crumble.
Just the first period alone was enough to drive the frustration level up.
There was the early penalty to Alex Ovechkin, less than 30 seconds into the game, or the first strike by the Sabres a few minutes later, the first time in five games the Caps have given up the game’s first goal (and just the second time during the current streak). There was the roughing double-minor doled out to – who else? – Tom Wilson for coming to the aid of his goaltender (aka two extra minutes for being Tom Wilson). And there was Chad Johnson stopping all 14 shots he faced in the game’s opening twenty minutes.
It didn’t get much better in the second period. The Caps were finally able to capitalize on a mistake by Johnson to get on the board late in the period, but Buffalo again pulled ahead on a fluky goal with less than two minutes to go in the frame. That kind of goal, at the end of a period, can be a back-breaker… but that would soon be the least of the team’s worries, as by the time the horn sounded to end the second frame, both Jay Beagle and Nicklas Backstrom had left the game with injuries.
Down two centers (and already missing their top defensive pair), and facing a hot goalie, it would’ve been very easy for this team to just chalk it up as “one of those nights” and start looking ahead to their next game. A one-goal deficit isn’t much for this team to overcome, but with a depleted lineup and on the front half of back-to-back games, it would have been understandable if they’d packed it in.
They didn’t.
Instead, the Caps came out of the locker room on a mission.
A little over a minute into the third, the new-look top line of Ovechkin, Evgeny Kuznetsov and T.J. Oshie combined for one of their now trademark beautiful plays to get the Caps back even. A power-play goal, once again orchestrated by Kuznetsov and finished off to perfection by Marcus Johansson, put the Caps in the lead for the first time. And then less than two minutes later it was Johansson setting up Andre Burakovsky for his first goal since October 23 to all but seal the deal. Capped off by the rarest of sights, an empty-net goal (the captain’s 20th of the season), the win streak remained in tact.
When the Caps have had to put together comebacks this season, it’s taken a combination of so many things to make it happen – special teams, secondary scoring, goaltending, the stars being the stars, etc. And while this win needed all of that, it also needed something more. It required a level of confidence and a commitment to doing all of the little things well. The Caps had to kill penalties without one of the team’s best penalty-killers, to score without the team’s top playmaker, and to shut down the other team without two of the team’s big-minute defensemen.
It was a lesson in adapting to obstacles and finding a way to overcome them. As cheesy as that may sound, it’s exactly the type of lesson that any contending team needs to learn. These are the kinds of tests that prepare a team for the tougher ones ahead, both in the near future (especially as the injuries mount) and into the postseason.
It’s a win like last night that seems bigger than the two points they’re worth in the standings – that reminds this team what they’re capable of doing. And that’s huge.