WASHINGTON, DC — Few leads are safe from this year’s Washington Capitals. After an embarrassing start against the Utah Hockey Club saw the Caps allow two goals in the first two minutes on Sunday, Washington went into the second intermission down 4-2. In the third period, however, goals from Dylan Strome and Tom Wilson tied the score late, pushing the game to overtime and later an unsuccessful shootout.
Sunday’s comeback effort has become a familiar pattern for the team — the Capitals have pulled off similar feats in three of their last five games. Playing against the Ottawa Senators on January 30, the Winnipeg Jets on February 1, and now the Utah Hockey Club, Washington recovered from multi-goal deficits in the third period, losing all three contests in overtime but earning a point in the standings each time.
Even when the Capitals put together arguably their worst start all season, they knew they could dig themselves out of the hole — after all, they’ve done it before.
“Yeah, I think even when we got down 2-0, [we] just knew we were going to score at some point,” Dylan Strome said postgame.
Tom Wilson credited his and his teammates’ close-knit bonds with helping them to turn the tide partway through a bad game, pushing them to do better and fight until the final horn.
“I think the closeness of the group (enables us),” he said. “I think the accountability, when we know it’s not good enough and we fall behind, to look at each other and get back into it, and depend on the guy next to you. So we’ve had a close group since day one.”
Head coach Spencer Carbery offered a similar sentiment, adding that not only do his players encourage each other to compete at a high level, but they’ve also found ways to eke out points when they fall short of their best play, pointing to both Sunday’s performance and last Thursday’s comeback win against the Philadelphia Flyers.
“Just belief and resiliency inside the group,” he said. “These guys just refuse to — even when there’s times through an 82-game schedule… [when] your team doesn’t have it, that’s going to happen, right? However many times, you want to limit that, but it’s going to happen, okay? So, in those games, do you keep fighting? And do you try to change momentum? Do you not give in to, ‘Oh, we don’t have it tonight?’ And that’s what our team has continued to do. Even when we don’t have it, we’ve found ways to get a point or even sometimes win those hockey games, i.e., Philadelphia, i.e., tonight, are prime examples of when we don’t have it, and we get outplayed for significant portions of the game.
“But we just keep fighting and keep grinding and keep believing that we’re going to get an equalizer or one goal and then two. The guys support one another, and I’ve said a bunch — that’s the best quality of our team. There’s a ton of belief in our room, and there’s a ton of togetherness and resiliency, and they’re never going to lay down and just fold the tent because we’re trailing or because we quote-unquote ‘don’t have our legs’ or don’t have it that night.”
Though the trio of recent multi-goal comebacks have all ended in defeat, the Capitals have a league-leading 18 comeback wins, including five third-period comeback victories, and have earned at least one point in eighteen of their last 19 games.
Still, the Capitals’ string of comebacks exposes how often they have allowed opponents to take the lead. Washington has led for just 37:03 in their last five contests, never managing to lead in three of those games.
Carbery acknowledged that — while the team’s resiliency was encouraging — he knew the trend of deficits was dangerous.
“I’m not in love with some of the ways that it’s happening and why we’re getting down into games and having to fight our way back. I think I’ve said this before earlier in the year: when this continues to happen, we’ve got to do something about it because if you play with fire and you put yourself down in this league two goals consistently, it’s not going to end well. I don’t care how resilient your team is. So that part’s good, the coming back, the staying with it, but we’ve got to do a way better job of limiting the amount of times we put ourselves in this situation. It’s happening way too frequently.”
Wilson, too, criticized the need for comebacks even as he praised his teammates’ ability to pull them off.
“Obviously, you don’t want to fall behind,” he said. “We’ve got to start better. We’ve got to play with leads. But when you do fall behind, there’s no doubt in this group. We have a belief, and we go out there and get it done.”
With no players participating in the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off, the Caps will have over a week to rest, recover from any nagging injuries, and recenter before the final two months of the regular season. Once they return, they’ll aim to play from behind less, negating the need for repeated comebacks. But if they do go down again, they’ll know the game is far from over.
