The Washington Capitals are trailing in a playoff series for the first time this season, dropping Game 1 to the Carolina Hurricanes in overtime on Tuesday night. Though Aliaksei Protas broke the ice early in the second period to put the Caps up 1-0, Carolina’s Logan Stankoven tied the game in the third before Jaccob Slavin sealed the deal in the extra frame.
Washington may have held the only lead in regulation, but the Hurricanes were in control for most of the night. Carolina outshot the Capitals by a factor of two (33-14) and held a dominant 94-34 advantage in shot attempts — the eventual overtime-winner came off an unlikely shot, but the sheer volume of offensive opportunities proved too much for the Capitals to handle.
“Their whole thing is they’re going to funnel a ton of pucks to the net, and eventually something bad will happen,” Nic Dowd said Wednesday. “Just like you saw the goal last night, the overtime goal. It’s just a fluky one that goes in. But you give them enough opportunities, something weird is bound to happen just like it did. But all in all I don’t think we played a very good game, so we’ll obviously be looking to get back to what we do best (in Game 2).”
The Hurricanes’ shot-heavy approach was exactly as expected — head coach Spencer Carbery said their consistent systems made them the “most predictable team in the National Hockey League,” but the Capitals failed to respond.
“There’s nothing they did yesterday from a systematic standpoint that caught us by surprise,” Carbery said Wednesday. “They did it at a very high level and the surprise — or where you’re hoping as a coach it doesn’t look that way — is our level, our ability to combat that. Our ability to ‘Okay, we know what’s coming. Here’s what we have to do, X, Y, Z. X, Y, Z’ didn’t come to fruition, so you’re seeing what you saw yesterday.”
Brandon Duhaime put it more simply: it was the Capitals’ low points, not the Hurricanes’ high points, that decided the game.
“I think it’s not as much what they did, but what we didn’t do yesterday,” he said. “We kind of have to look in the mirrors at ourselves and just improve.”
Still, the Capitals weren’t ever out of the game. A breakaway chance from Ryan Leonard could have given them a 2-0 lead and a likely win in Game 1, Logan Thompson put up a strong performance in net, and an unlucky bounce ultimately helped Slavin score in overtime.
The Capitals know they can’t fully stymie the Hurricane’s offensive chances, but they also know they don’t need to. Though Carolina out-attempted the Caps in all four of this year’s regular-season meetings, Washington went 2-0-0 in those contests, making the most of the chances they did get.
“The best way to prevent them having 94 shot attempts and whipping the puck at the net from all over the ice is to go play down in the O-zone,” Dowd said.
With a day to prepare before Game 2 on Thursday night, Carbery stressed balance, not pure defense, as the way to shut down the Hurricane’s style of play. They may not be able to generate as many chances as Carolina can, but they’ll need more than the got Tuesday if they want to avoid leaving DC with a 2-0 series deficit.
“We can’t defend for the amount of time that we defended last night, be under attack for as long as we were, and expect to have success in this series,” Carbery said. “But we understand that Carolina and what they do, they’re going to control play for significant portions of the game. 95 shot attempts, it was a little high. So we’re going to need to bring that down.
“Is it still going to be probably in the 60s, maybe 70s? Yeah, probably around there. That’s around their average. So you’re not going to eliminate what they do well, you just have to get it back to balancing out. We didn’t get nearly enough on their half; they were in our end for way too long.”
