Caps back to showing rare mix of skill and brute strength
Maybe Carolina Hurricanes defenceman Dougie Hamilton thought an icing was coming as both he and Alex Ovechkin pursued a puck down the ice in Game 5. But Ovechkin has a different theory of why Hamilton suddenly bailed, leaving a loose puck for Ovechkin to snag and then pass to the front of the net for a Brett Connolly goal. Ovechkin and other Washington Capitals had been tossing the Hurricanes aside all game with crushing hits, so maybe Hamilton just didn’t want to be next.
“I think it’s that we hit their D,” Ovechkin said. “I don’t know, he just stopped skating.”
The Capitals have an abundance of skill and speed, but they’re also big, from the 235-pound Ovechkin to six-foot-four, 218-pound
Tom Wilson to six-foot-three, 217-pound defenceman Brooks Orpik. In an NHL that’s shifted toward a quick transition game, Washington is a rare hybrid with the personnel to excel at that style while also slowing down an opposing team with a bruising forecheck.
Through the first four games of this first-round series with the Hurricanes, the Capitals had taken more hits than they’d dished out, especially where it concerned Carolina’s fleet-footed defencemen. In Saturday night’s 6-0 Game 5 victory to take a
3-2 series lead, Washington rediscovered its muscle, credited with 48 hits, 14 of those on the Hurricanes’ blueliners.
“No matter who you are, when you have to keep going back over and over and over and you’re getting hit, to break the puck out, I mean it takes a toll,” forward Devante Smith-Pelly said.
“You saw that in the second and third period.”
With winger T.J. Oshie sidelined with a broken collarbone, the Capitals recalled Smith-Pelly from the American Hockey League before Saturday’s game, and while they were hopeful he could provide the kind of depth scoring he did a year ago — he was a hero of the team’s Stanley Cup run with seven goals, equalling his regular-season total — the more realistic expectation was that he’d provide a physical spark Washington had been missing. He’s listed at
223 pounds, and on his first shift, he hit Carolina forward Nino Niederreiter, garnering even more applause from a home crowd happy to see him back.
“We knew we needed more physical investment, particularly on their defencemen,” coach Todd Reirden said. “That was a discussion point for us, and something we felt that could give us a better chance to have success — to be able to draw some more penalties, to be able to play in the offensive zone more often, to be able to impose our will ...
“You don’t know the breaking point for any opposition, but this was a big part of our success last year, that we needed to invest and force the opposition to play a difficult game. Eventually if you do it for long enough and you believe in the rest of your systems enough, you will break them, and that will allow you to get the results you need, which is building your confidence.”
Physicality can separate a player from the puck, or it can generate energy in a home arena. Over the course of a seven-game series, it can wear on a team on multiple fronts — the soreness from repeated checks physically slowing players down while also making them more tentative on the ice out of fear of getting hit. It’s something the Capitals feed off, from their biggest players landing the kind of hits that elicit a reaction from the crowd or the bench to their smallest players doing their part by not coughing the puck up along the wall.
It helped win Washington a
Cup last year, and after an identity crisis to start these playoffs, the Caps have seemingly rediscovered their menacing form.