Home / Game Recap / Collapsitals beat Devils 5-4 in overtime

Collapsitals beat Devils 5-4 in overtime

By Peter Hassett

 3 Comments

March 9, 2021 9:44 pm

The Washington Capitals played a perfectly perplexing game against the New Jersey Devils on Tuesday night. The Caps took an early lead, but bad defensive decisions and some kind of acute allergy to offense blew it for them in the third.

TJ Oshie scored the only goal of the first period, deftly deflecting Justin Schultz’s shot. Jakub Vrana finished off a beautiful four-on-four passing sequence for his ninth of the season. Daniel Sprong had the gosh-darn temerity to not pass to Ovi on an odd-man rush to make it 2-0. Then Janne Kuokkanen faced some criminally defective defense to crack the shutout, but Dmitry Orlov replied, making it 4-1 after forty minutes.

In the third, Miles Wood had a ton of steam as he took a pass from Jesper Bratt to beat Vanecek, then Yegor Sharangovich had an open lane to bring the Devils within one. Damon Severson tied it and took us to overtime. That’s where Jakub Vrana got back on the ice and won it.

Caps win!

  • Weird game. The Capitals easily controlled flow of the game during even strength, but whenever the Devils got into the zone, they got all the way up in Vanecek’s crease. I’ll let Chris address this more completely in the Numbers story tomorrow morning, but the gap between shot attempts and high-danger chances was bizarre. I’ve never seen anything like it.
  • Daniel Sprong had a curious breakaway in the second period. He and Ovechkin raced towards the Devils net. Any younger player would of course defer to Ovi and make the pass there, but Sprong, at the peak of hubris, called his own number. His smile in the celebration was devious. I love it. (Sprong should get a jersey more often.)
  • Evgeny Kuznetsov did like a karate kick to keep Mikhail Maltsev’s forecheck pressure away from him. I dunno if that’s legal?

  • Vitek Vanecek will never get a shutout. I’ve come to terms with this. He and Backstrom had a miscommunication as they faced a dump-in, and then the pucked ended up in the net.
  • It wasn’t just those two though — the Caps’ defense was weird all night.

  • It only got worse from there, with the Devils buzzing while the Caps continued to do weird stuff like Brendon Dillon’s blue-line pinch.

After 25 years of watching this team and a decade of covering them, it’s hard for me to be stunned. But I’m stunned. The Capitals took a commanding lead and then just mega-turtled themselves out of a regulation win. The third period was slow-motion self-sabotage. It was obvious from the Miles Wood goal six minutes in that they had the wrong read on the game, but they didn’t adjust. The Devils aren’t a worldbeating team or anything, but they’re fast enough to punish the hell out of Washington’s meekness.

Good for the Devils, I guess. Maybe the Caps just needed to learn this lesson so they don’t repeat it.

Thank you, the one and only Jake Bean.

RMNB Coverage of Caps vs Devils

,