The Capitals put together one of the better performances we’ve seen out of them in quite some time last night, controlling play almost from the drop of the puck and rolling to a 5-1 win.
That lopsided final was anything but guaranteed, however, as the game remained close through the first two periods. After peppering Minnesota goalie Filip Gustavsson with 20+ shots, the Caps had only one goal to show for their efforts by late in the second period – and then that one-goal lead disintegrated as quickly as you can say “MoJo”, with former Cap Marcus Johansson potting the equalizer past a screened Logan Thompson.
It would have been easy for the Caps to get frustrated, finding themselves in a tie game against a team they were dominating at both ends of the ice. Instead, they got a goal from the hottest hand on the bench, and got it quickly, to turn things back in their favor.
Roughly 30 seconds after Johansson’s tally, the Caps’ second line of Aliaksei Protas, Connor McMichael, and Tom Wilson hit the ice and went on the attack. Despite a bit of a broken play, the trio retained possession of the puck, and Wilson flipped a pass up to Protas who had shifted up to the circle to Gustavsson’s left. From there, he fired off a shot toward the net that looked like it was trying to create a rebound for McMichael, but instead whipped through Gustavsson’s legs for the 2-1 lead:
As a whole, it wasn’t the prettiest of plays (although it certainly wasn’t ugly). But the timeliness of it, the way the Caps bounced right back from having the score tied up and went on the attack and immediately took the lead back? That’s huge, and a big reason why they maintained control of the game (and went on to score three more goals) until the final buzzer.
The Caps take their four-game winning streak into the weekend and get ready to host Vancouver in a matinee tomorrow.