The Washington Capitals fell to the Toronto Maple Leafs 4-3 in overtime, Wednesday night. But it was the way that they lost that really bothered Capitals head coach Spencer Carbery.
The Caps, playing on home ice for the first time since Friday, took a commanding 3-1 lead into the third period against a tired Leafs team that had suited up the night before. They held that lead until the final five minutes of regulation before giving up two goals in quick succession, pushing the game to overtime and allowing John Tavares to end the game with a breakaway goal.
During the final two periods of regulation, the Capitals did not match the Leafs’ push: Toronto outshot Washington 26 to 13 and out-attempted them 46 to 21 at five-on-five.
“The way that that game played out, just embarrassing,” a frustrated Carbery said postgame. “Flat out — that’s unrecognizable from our team.”
Thursday morning, before the Capitals took off for a three-game road trip, the team held a relatively short practice at MedStar Capitals Iceplex — not the bag skate one might expect after a disheartening loss. Carbery addressed the performance from the night before and admitted the game tape was hard to watch.
“Yeah, [it was] honestly worse than originally thought at the time,” Carbery said. “Sometimes you’re hesitant to make bold statements after games because sometimes you’re in the heat of the moment, but I felt pretty confident last night that it was going to look the way it looked when I watched it from the bench, and it was not good on film as well.”
The way Carbery saw it, the mere fact that his team lost wasn’t his biggest issue. What he really struggled with was how the players didn’t match the Leafs’ intensity as they tried to come back in the game.
“It’s not about the winning,” Carbery said. “It’s about how it looks and whether we meet that level. You’re going to lose games in this league. That’s the way it works. It’s a competitive league teams are good. You’re going to have bounces [that] aren’t gonna go your way. It’s just us meeting that urgency level that it has to look like.
“Our urgency level at times needs to get increased like we’re playing,” he added. “I know it’s Game 15. I understand. It’s very early in the season, but you can already see teams coming into our building, at least I can see it from the way that they’re playing and the way that things transpire on the ice from a puck battle from a competitiveness from a urgency to backcheck, all the little details of the game, you can see that there’s some teams in some spots that feel like there’s a lot at stake. And so if we’re not getting to that, that’s our bread and butter. We get to that level every night and that’s what we pride ourselves on. I just feel like at times that slipped through through the year, whether it’s Pittsburgh, Nashville, last night for sure.”
The Capitals will look to bounce back to their winning ways during one of their most difficult stretches of the season. The team will plat three Western Conference teams over a four-night span: Colorado on Friday, Vegas on Sunday, and Utah on Monday. So far this season, the Capitals have a 4-0-0 record in the game after a loss.
“I’ve talked about it before we have a great locker room of guys that care and want to do the right thing and want to play the right way and desperately want to win,” Carbery said. “It’s not gonna get any easier now you go on the road. You’re looking at Colorado, Vegas, like we’re just focused on Colorado, but these are tough tough teams, tough environments to play in. So you better make sure that your desperation level is at least meeting the opponent. We like to exceed that on a regular occasion.”
