The Capitals came into San Jose yesterday looking to bounce back after a frustrating loss in LA – and maybe get a little revenge for a Sharks’ overtime win back in DC earlier this season. Mission accomplished for the good guys, as they took a 5-1 win out of Silicon Valley and ended their California trip on a high note.
The goal from Trevor van Riemsdyk in the third period to regain the three-goal lead was both needed and hilarious, Logan Thompson stood tall to keep his team in the lead, and of course, any time Alex Ovechkin scores is a good time (8 goals away…). But this victory was earned off a roughly ten-minute stretch in the first period that saw the Caps erupt for three goals.
Unsurprisingly, it was red-hot Dylan Strome who got the party started. He starts the play in his own zone, moving a breakout pass to Tom Wilson along the boards before driving up the middle. As Wilson finds Ovechkin with a cross-ice pass (and a little help from Sharks defender Shakir Mukhamadullin, who deflected it over to #8), Strome is able to sneak past both Macklin Celebrini and William Eklund to break in alone. Ovechkin finds him in front with a lovely pass, Strome puts the puck past Alexandar Georgiev, and it’s 1-0:
That’s where the score would stay for about ten minutes, before another of the team’s hot hands, Aliaksei Protas, got into the action – and he did so in kind of a classic Protas way, making what could have been an ugly goal look pretty:
Good job by Lars Eller to get the cycle going and then drive the net, creating the garbage for Protas to clean up.
The final goal of the mini offensive outburst came about a minute and a half after Protas gave the Caps a 2-0 lead, this time with Taylor Raddysh getting into the action to put his boys up by three.
Rasmus Sandin makes a nice play at the line to disrupt an attempted clearing play by the Sharks and then another nice play to get around Alexander Wennberg and get the puck back in the offensive zone. Pierre-Luc Dubois collects the dumped-in puck and sends it to John Carlson at the point, who slaps it over to Raddysh, who fires it home:
Despite a little bit of a dropoff – and plenty of feistiness, for some reason? – in the middle 20 and the early part of the third, the Capitals did a great job of setting the tone early and then dropping the hammer late to take a solid 5-1 win home.
They’ll get a couple of days to rest and then it’s back to work on Tuesday at home against the Red Wings.