The Washington Capitals and Vegas Golden Knights closed out their season series and today’s NHL slate with a meeting at T-Mobile Arena tonight. When these teams met just over a month ago, the game ended in a 3-2 Washington win. Both squads look different than the last time they faced each other, most notably with Nic Dowd switching rosters at the trade deadline. Was it in the cards for him to burn his former teammates? Unfortunately for the Caps, the answer was yes (see below). Fortunately for the Caps, however, they managed to pull out the win—and in the shootout!
Plus: The first half of the game was all Capitals. Hendrix Lapierre opened the scoring at 6:06, getting in alone on Adin Hill after Brandon Duhaime and Ivan Miroshnichenko helped force a turnover. Then Justin Sourdif scored on the power play just 1:55 into the second with assists from Connor McMichael and Cole Hutson. Five minutes later. Anthony Beauvillier put the Caps up 3-0 with a beautiful deflection of a perfect feed from Ryan Leonard. Three goals on nine shots, all in the first 27 minutes of the game.
Minus: After that Beauvillier goal, things started to fall apart for Washington. For the second time this month, the Caps allowed two shorthanded goals on the same power play. The first one (see above) was scored by the one and only Nic Dowd. Speaking of Dowd, there was also a very scary collision early on between him and Aliaksei Protas. Protas was pushed into Dowd from behind by Jeremy Lauzon, and Protas and Dowd made direct helmet-on-helmet contact. Dowd got a pretty nasty cut on his forehead and needed to head to the locker room for some repairs, but he did eventually return (to score his shorty, no less). Protas, on the other hand, took a while to get up after the collision and was wobbly on his way off the ice. He was ruled out for the rest of the game with an upper-body injury.
Caps Player of the Game: Have yourself a night, Cole Hutson! With two power play assists, he recorded the first multi-point game of his young NHL career. His second apple of the night was on Dylan Strome’s PPG, and it was an absolute beauty of a pass: