If you were looking for a clean, well-played hockey game between the Capitals and Senators last night, well…you were probably sorely disappointed.
Fans of chaos, however, were in for quite a treat, as this game had a little bit of everything (except for good hockey, but who really wants that??).
The Caps erased deficits of 1-0, 3-1, and 4-2 to scrape out a point from a game in which they looked disconnected, tired, and sloppy for the majority of the game, save for a few bursts of competence and a final push to force overtime. They took two too many men penalties in less than four minutes to start the game. Special teams were on full display – in a good and a bad way – with six of the nine goals being scored either on the power play or shorthanded (more on that in a sec). It was, in short, chaos.
Now, while the Caps did manage to erase those deficits and grab a point in overtime, the story of the game really was a stretch of less than one minute in the second period when the game went from a tied game to not-so-tied, and when the tone of this weird, wild evening…shifted.
First, the Caps found themselves on the power play courtesy of a Travis Hamonic hook on Aliaksei Protas, and it seemed like the perfect time for them to take the lead for the first time in the game. Instead, they gave up a rush the other way, and in trying to stop Josh Norris, John Carlson did this:
Which resulted in a penalty shot for Norris, who then…did this:
That’s bad. It got worse when, 38 seconds later on that same power play, the Senators got yet another odd-man rush and did this:
So yeah. There were plenty more goals to come and an overtime before this one was officially decided, but that stretch in the second really gave us a sense of what kind of wild night we were in for.
Still, the Caps wrap up a very tough road trip with tons of travel and time zone changes with a perfectly respectable 3-1-1 record and seven out of the ten possible points. We will take that any day of the week, even if it had to end with an unhinged outing in Ottawa.
Come on home, boys. The Jets await.