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MONTREAL — The puck glanced off Washington Capitals goaltender Braden Holtby’s glove as he tried to catch it, and when he didn’t feel it land in his palm, he froze. Max Domi’s shot had skipped into the net behind him for the Montreal Canadiens’ go-ahead goal with 21.1 seconds left.
“I thought I read right where it went,” Holtby said. “I don’t know if it nicked off [John Carlson’s] stick or not. I’ll have to watch the replay. I thought I read it perfect.”
Washington called a timeout, plotting a last-ditch effort to tie the game after it had disastrously slipped away. But Montreal’s Joel Armia scored off the faceoff into an empty net for a second goal in three seconds. After the Capitals were three minutes away from their first two-game winning streak of the season, they instead left Bell Centre with a 6-4 loss. It was the kind of roller-coaster, inconsistent effort that has defined Washington’s first month of the season coming off its franchise-first Stanley Cup.
“We’re in control of the game, and then we mismanage the puck four times in the last seven, eight minutes,” Coach Todd Reirden said. “We just give them transition offense. We’ve got to continue to learn, and we’re learning some lessons the hard way right now.”
Jesperi Kotkaniemi’s first NHL goal earned the Finnish teenager a standing ovation in the first three minutes of the game. The Canadiens’ top pick in the most recent draft is one of the key pieces breathing new life into the arena after Montreal was one of the league’s worst teams last season. He got the crowd back to its feet with 3:04 left in regulation, when his shot trickled through Holtby’s legs to tie the game.
[Braden Holtby is always calm, cool and collected … unless you swipe a puck from a kid]
While that was a blow for the Capitals, the game seemed headed to overtime, where Washington would’ve at least gotten a standings point. But as the players digested the stunning turn of events late in the game, they felt they deserved their fate with some sloppy, turnover-laden play throughout. As Holtby put it, leaving Montreal with a win would’ve been “stealing one,” and his play until the last three minutes of the game was the main reason Washington was in control for the majority of the third period. He finished with 38 saves.
“It’s too bad we didn’t get the win because I think tonight Holts was outstanding,” captain Alex Ovechkin said. “The last few goals, the blame is on us.”
Said center Lars Eller: “We didn’t feel like we had the win in the bag, but we felt good. We’re pretty good at defending leads, but even with 10 minutes left, we kept making these bad decisions at their blue line and giving them odd-man rushes, which is not really characteristic for us. It’s usually not what we do, and there was too much of that today.”
On Thursday morning, Holtby referred to the team’s schedule for the first month of the season as “strange.” Washington had three separate breaks of at least three days between games, and perhaps that hurt their rhythm. Against the Canadiens, the Capitals’ passes weren’t crisp, and after they were arguably fortunate to come out of the first period tied, Montreal’s Brendan Gallagher scored twice in the first 3:06 of the second period to put the Capitals in a two-goal hole.
On Gallagher’s second goal, defenseman Michal Kempny’s pass coming out of the zone landed in Jakub Vrana’s skates, leading to a turnover. The Canadiens got an odd-man rush at the net, and as the puck caromed off the end boards, Holtby hugged the post in an attempt to seal off the left side. Gallagher still backhanded the puck through a short-side hole.
[With Travis Boyd nearing a return from injury, it’s decision time for Capitals]
But even as Washington’s play has been inconsistent, the team has shown it’s still capable of flashing the talent that won the Stanley Cup last season. The poor start to the second period seemed to jolt the Capitals into responding with three unanswered goals to take their first lead. Ovechkin scored on a two-on-one with center Evgeny Kuznetsov, and 70 seconds later, Eller scored his second goal of the game.
While production from Washington’s top-six forwards has been steady to start the season, secondary scoring has been an issue. Eller came into Thursday without having scored since the Oct. 3 opener, and the outburst against the Canadiens felt especially sweet after he played in Montreal for six years.
Less than five minutes after Eller tied the game, Ovechkin scored his second of the game. As he battled for position in front of the net, Dmitry Orlov’s shot bounced off the captain and past goaltender Carey Price for Ovechkin’s 10th goal of the season.
That gave the Capitals a 4-3 lead going into the third period, when some of the puck mismanagement mistakes they had gotten away with earlier in the game and earlier this season cost them the game.
“Luck seemed to be on our side for most of the third, and then it turned,” Holtby said.
“For us, it was overall and not just the last three minutes,” Eller said. “There were a lot of uncharacteristic mistakes for us, a lot of turnovers on the offensive blue line and not executing passes in our own zone. We got stuck having possession and then either not executing a pass or fumbling the puck.”
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