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Highlights from the Capitals’ 4-3 (OT) preseason victory over the Blue Jackets

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The Washington Capitals were successful in their preseason finale as they took down the Columbus Blue Jackets in overtime. Exhibition season complete.

Anthony Mantha, Alex Ovechkin, Nic Dowd, and Dylan Strome all got on the board for the Caps.

Here are the highlights and some takeaways from the game.

Goals

New dad Anthony Mantha opened the scoring with a nifty deflection of a Martin Fehervary shot.

Patrik Laine almost immediately tied things up with an absolute dart of a wrister.

Yegor Chinakhov gave Columbus a lead with his sixth goal of the preseason.

Alex Ovechkin absolutely slammed home his first non-empty net goal of the preseason to tie things back up late in the first.

Sean Kuraly via some help from John Carlson gave Columbus their lead back early in the second.

Nic Dowd squeaked one through Elvis Merzlikins to tie the game yet again.

Dylan Strome with the overtime winner via a Connor Brown feed.

Takeaways

  • Great to see Alex Ovechkin get on the board in a non-empty net setting. He had to score with his two sons in the building and score he did. Huge slapper that no goaltender is stopping.
  • I’d really like to see Lucas Johansen given a chance to take that third-pairing role next to Trevor van Riemsdyk. He has looked, for my money at least, much better than Erik Gustafsson during the preseason.
  • Jakub Voracek is one of my least favorite players in the league. He dives and is just generally annoying. Me and Mike Sielski, I guess.

  • Wasn’t in love with the effort during long stretches of this game. Just a preseason game but the five-on-five offense took forever to get going, there was a lot of sloppy defense, and they took a lot of bad penalties. I think you’d want your final tune-up game to be a little cleaner.
  • In my opinion, Aliaksei Protas should be in the lineup on day one of the regular season and in the top-nine forward group. No other player took such a clear jump in level over the offseason as he did. His emergence will let the team spread out their depth really nicely.
  • Really cool to see all the alumni get in on the broadcast. NBCSWA did a really good job with that. Sergei Gonchar was one of my favorites as a very small child.

The next time we’ll see the Caps on the ice inside of Capital One Arena it will be for real. They’ll take on the Boston Bruins in their regular season opener at home.

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