WASHINGTON, DC — Cole Hutson had just about the picture-perfect Capitals debut, complete with some shenanigans to close out the evening.
After Hutson scored his first NHL goal in Washington’s 4-1 win over the Ottawa Senators, he got a surprise interloper in his postgame interview: Tom Wilson in the locker room with the shaving-cream pie.
Cole Hutson gets pied in the face by Tom Wilson
Midway through a question, Wilson pushed his way into the media scrum (startling your friendly neighborhood RMNB reporter into ducking out of the way) to nail Hutson in the face with a cream-filled towel.
Despite the surprise attack—which also caught a Capitals PR staffer in the crossfire, Hutson came close to avoiding the blow.
“He’s got such good vision; he almost dodged me!” Wilson piped up as he left.
Wilson, who memorably took a pie to the face from Alex Ovechkin after his first career NHL goal, has continued the tradition with several Capitals rookies over the years. That experience has seemingly helped his aim.
“He stuffed it in my nose,” Hutson said, using the edges of the towel to wipe himself off.
Hutson got most of the shaving cream off his face, but his shirt took the brunt of the hit and remained covered in the stuff for the rest of his interview. Later in the scrum, he scratched his ear only to come away with more cream to wipe off, eliciting another round of laughter.
So how did it feel to take a shaving cream pie to the face from Wilson?
“Not good,” Hutson said. “It smells bad.”
Hutson told reporters Wednesday morning that he “couldn’t be more nervous” about making his NHL debut, and that carried through to his first shift as one of the Capitals’ starters.
“I was so scared,” he said. “I just wanted to get out there and get off as fast as possible, but we had them in the O-zone, so couldn’t really change.”
The butterflies didn’t go away as the game went on.
“Didn’t really feel too comfortable the whole game,” he said. “Was so nervous all night and just wanted to not make any mistakes and just come out with the team win.”
He might have been nervous, but that didn’t seem to affect his performance: he made multiple dangerous offensive plays throughout the night before finally notching a goal with less than a minute remaining.
“It’s a funny feeling when you have a first-year, first-game guy and he’s got the puck back there, and you’re just confident that he’s going to make the right play and he’s going to do good things with it,” Wilson said, just minutes before the Pie Incident. “So it’s a pretty cool feeling when a kid comes in with that much poise and can make plays, and you can just see the potential.”
“He had a lot of poise,” noted Logan Thompson. “I feel like he fit right in and didn’t look nervous at all. For his first game, he’s only going to get better, and I think he’s got a bright future in the NHL and here with the Washington Capitals.”
Even in his debut, Hutson spent much of the night with the puck on his stick, outmaneuvering Senators players with years more experience than him.
“I think you’re going to get used to that,” said Carbery. “That’s Cole Hutson. That’s his bread and butter, is he can out-wait defenders.”
Hutson jumped right onto Washington’s power play, which left him on the ice as a shorthanded Senators team emptied the net late in the third. When he and Connor McMichael went on an odd-man rush, McMichael insisted that Hutson take the shot.
“[McMichael is] doing everything other than pulling flares out and saying, ‘Do not pass me the puck,’” said head coach Spencer Carbery. “And I can see him hand signaling like, ‘No, do not even think about passing it over to me.’”
“I couldn’t even pass to him if [I] tried,” Hutson added. “He had no stick on the ice. Just wanted me to take it all the way in, so kind of had to.”
Thanks in part to McMichael’s urging, Hutson ended the night with an NHL goal under his belt and a little bit of shaving cream still up his nose.
