The Washington Capitals had a sleepy start against the Seattle Kraken Sunday afternoon, but chaos erupted during the final 20 minutes.
Partway through the third period, a Tom Wilson hit on Seattle’s Josh Mahura set off a team-wide scrum deep in the Kraken’s end of the ice. After John Hayden and Mikey Eyssimont jumped to Mahura’s defense, Caps and Kraken players rushed to join the bout and things devolved from there.
John Carlson, Pierre-Luc Dubois, Trevor van Riemsdyk, and Brandon Montour, all threw themselves into the pile-up, while Brandon Duhaime was even more ambitious, tackling Kraken forward Tye Kartye in the right circle and then attempting to push his head through the ice.
After the game, Dylan Strome noted that tensions had been simmering all afternoon before finally boiling over in the scuffle.
“There was some chirping going on back and forth through most of the game,” he said. “A little chippy, I think.”
With so many players all going at each other at once, officials struggled to keep the brawl contained — as soon as they could pull two skaters apart, two more would join up for another round. Dropped gloves and sticks piled up as officials gradually broke up the fracas.
Wilson, still fired up even as a linesman dragged him to the penalty box, wobbled and shook his gloves at one of the Kraken players in another brilliant fake-tough-guy taunt.
By the time the dust cleared, the penalty boxes were stuffed to the brim, with all 10 skaters who participated sent off the ice for a time-out.
Seattle came out of the scrum on the power play after officials assessed Brandon Duhaime two roughing penalties for his role in the shenanigans, and both he and Hayden also earned themselves a 10-minute misconduct.
Though he’d never witnessed anything like it at home, the melee reminded Alex Ovechkin of the Capitals’ 2021 line brawl against the New York Rangers.
“Cap One, no, but I remember Madison Square,” he said when asked if he’d seen 10 players in the box at once before.
Kraken captain Jordan Eberle tied the game 2-2 shortly after the chaos, but the Caps went back ahead in the final five minutes as McMichael deflected a Carlson shot for the game-winner before Ovechkin sealed the deal with an empty-net goal.
While Carlson downplayed the skirmish postgame, saying it was “just a bunch of people just grabbing each other, nothing really,” Connor McMichael highlighted the energy both the fight and the Capitals’ fans’ reactions gave the team.
“I think [the brawl] was exactly what turned up the heat,” Connor McMichael said of the bout. “Guys got into it and we didn’t want to back down to anyone on their team. I felt like the crowd got a lot more alive after that moment and it fed us a lot of energy, so credit to the fans, honestly.”
