NHL
NHL Playoffs
WASHINGTON — This series started 11 days ago.
So, for the better part of two weeks, the Washington Capitals had to scratch and claw and grind and dip and dive and whistle past the looming offseason. They had to try to convince us — they had to try to convince themselves — that actually, the Carolina Hurricanes were beatable. Their second-round opponent might have been a bad matchup specifically and a good team more generally, but the mountain was scalable all the same.
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And then, after five games separated by a gap that was a foot wide and a mile deep, poof. Thursday night, the Capitals could drop the act. Their season was over, the Hurricanes’ season rolled on, and the losing side was free to reflect on just how difficult it was always going to be and how acutely the league’s most suffocating team lived up to its billing.
Call them ugly, call them boring, call them bad TV — just make sure you call the Hurricanes a brutally effective hockey team. They just made short work of the Eastern Conference’s No. 1 seed, and those guys seem to agree.
The Capitals sounded disappointed, exhausted, frustrated. They sounded, finally, honest.
“I feel like we match up really well against a lot of teams,” Dylan Strome said after Washington’s 3-1 loss, “and obviously, Carolina wasn’t one of those teams.”
Nobody embodied the Capitals’ plight more than their No. 1 center. That’s a title, by the way, that’s well earned. Strome has spent years going from stalled prospect to a legitimate, capital-G Guy for a playoff team. He’s not a perfect player, though; nor are his teammates. Through 82 games, we knew their strong suits and their pressure points. Washington didn’t dominate the puck at five-on-five. It often struggled to gain and keep the offensive zone. It relied too heavily on its power play.
Those aren’t fatal flaws against every good team. But against the Hurricanes? Pretty close. And Thursday, Strome sounded like a guy who knew it all along.
“The way they played just kind of …” Strome trailed off and exhaled through his teeth. “We didn’t get a ton. And (when) they got a goalie that’s playing like that and has that kind of confidence and you don’t get a ton, it’s tough to beat them.”
We’ll start with that goalie they’ve got. Frederik Andersen allowed six goals in the series. Six. On 95 shots. Nobody is beating a team with a goalie throwing up a .937 save percentage over five games. Thursday, he was at his best in the first minute of the third period. With the score tied at 1, Capitals center Pierre-Luc Dubois finally made it behind the Hurricanes’ defense. In free and close, he shot the puck into Andersen’s pad.
“There’s a couple other (saves), but that one in particular,” Hurricanes coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “All of a sudden, we have that breakdown, and there’s a save. And he bails us out. And that’s what great goaltending does for a team, and obviously, we hope that continues.”
For the Hurricanes, it might. For Washington, the car is in the garage.
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Ultimately, Andersen made his teammates’ work stand up. He’s getting credit for it — delayed, maybe, but credit all the same. To boil the result down to goaltending, though, would be to do a disservice to the rest of the roster. It would be reductive and wrong, just like it’d be reductive and wrong to pin it all on the Hurricanes’ relentless, all-directions pressure on opposing puck carriers. Faced with that, Washington went from averaging 27 shots a game in the regular season to 19 in the second round.
“They close, obviously, really quick,” Strome said. “You could probably count on your hand the amount of times we actually set up and got some chances.”
Tom Wilson agreed: “I give credit to their team. They got some players that make it extremely hard on you to generate open space and good looks at the net. They smother you.”
It’d be wrong to pin it on their ridiculous penalty kill — even though at one point Thursday night, they had all four of their PKers pushed up into the Capitals’ zone. (Who does that?)
Strome brought that up, too. Washington scored one five-on-four goal in the series. “We tried a bunch of different things. And ultimately it’s on us that we couldn’t figure out how to …” He paused again. “You shouldn’t have to dump a puck on a power play.”
It’d be wrong to pin it all on their defensemen’s active sticks, though Capitals coach Spencer Carbery gave that its due: “Their ability to break plays up with their sticks, there’s no team in the league like ’em.”
And it was Carbery, naturally, who summed it all up.
“I think the main takeaway of this is Carolina is one heck of an opponent. So all the things that we’re going to talk about — our shortcomings that we have, whether that be special teams, five-on-five scoring, depth scoring — we can break it all down. The first part you have to look at is not the lack of that from the Washington Capitals. (It’s) how the Carolina Hurricanes did that to the Washington Capitals.”
They sure did. And they did it quickly. In the end, nobody should be all that surprised.
(Top photo: Bruce Bennett / Getty Images)
Sean Gentille is a senior writer for The Athletic covering the NHL. He previously covered Pittsburgh sports with the The Athletic and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the NHL for Sporting News, and he’s a graduate of the University of Maryland. Follow Sean on Twitter @seangentille
