Ovie’s Caps blow best shot at Cup
Ghosts still linger despite Pens defence rocked by injuries
Alexander Ovechkin spoke at something above a whisper: a murmur, really, as if the words were echoing off the inside of his skull. He spoke in short sentences. He was asked, finally: Alex, can you keep the faith that you and the Washington Capitals can get past the second round?
“We’re trying,” he said, after a pause. He spoke slowly, wrapped in red towels. “Try to do our best.”
This was not Ovechkin’s failure alone; it was Washington’s, again. The Capitals had come back from a 3-1 series deficit, and had overwhelmed the injuryplagued Pittsburgh Penguins in Games 5 and 6. They came in confident. They talked about how they had discussed their previous failures, really dug down, and had come out with a new certainty. They were the best team left in these strange playoffs. This was their chance.
And then Pittsburgh scored midway through the second period after weathering early pressure, and Washington’s chances just wouldn’t go in. They were down 1-0 going into the third. After Game 4 the Capitals talked about not just throwing pucks at the net — “we were trying to play what everyone thought was playoff hockey,” said defenceman Karl Alzner — and trying to actually finish plays. Now, with the pressure on, they had to hold their nerve.
But four minutes into the third Ovechkin tried to skip a 50-50 puck up the boards in the Capitals zone, and Justin Schultz turned it back. Patric Hornqvist slapped at a backhand and it flew past Braden Holtby and in with 15:44 left, and Ovechkin had watched both goals go in, on the ice. They weren’t his fault, really. He taps that puck down and he has a great chance, 50-50. Tried to make a play.
But it went the other way, and he will wear it. The Capitals only managed six shots on goal in the third period. Somehow, Ovechkin was seventh among Washington forwards in ice time at five-on-five. It all happened again, and the Capitals were left to reckon with it.
“It’s all of us, every single one of us,” said goaltender Braden Holtby, who stopped 24 of 26 shots. “Last year (when Washington lost to Pittsburgh in Game 6), it was a close game, played well, and overtime. I think tonight, I don’t think we gave ourselves a chance, and we’re going to have to live with that, and take responsibility for that. Because it’s not what we worked for.” Asked if this team had a mental hurdle, Holtby said, “I thought (Games) 5 and 6 we fought through that. We were on a mission. And it wasn’t the same team out there.”
“I really liked our first two periods,” said Capitals coach Barry Trotz. “I thought once they got their second goal . . . at that point we didn’t have the struc- ture that would give us a chance to get back in. Just couldn’t convert in the first two periods.”
It was a Biblical failure, this time. Pittsburgh’s defensive corps was decimated without Kris Letang. Washington had found an extra gear.
In this game they started great, but Pittsburgh mucked up the neutral zone and never panicked. Midway through the second period defenceman Matt Niskanen turned over a puck at the Washington blue line.
Sidney Crosby started the tic-tactoe that ended with big-game Bryan Rust roofing it in the slot: 1-0 Penguins, and Ovechkin watched it go. Crank that tension wheel, will you?
After that goal Washington had opportunities, and none better than this one: Ovie in the slot, a prime-rib chance. The shot hit the shaft of Marc-Andre Fleury’s goal stick, and the goalie grinned afterwards and rubbed the spot when it hit with affection. Sometimes you need to get lucky.
Ovechkin had a breakaway early in that 2009 Game 7; he wondered years later how it would have been different if he had scored. This one, he will see in his dreams.
“There are times when you know you are not the best team in the playoffs, or playing the best,” said Alzner, who has been here all the way. “But we honestly thought we were the best team in the playoffs, and showed flashes of it.”
There was a time when Crosby and Ovechkin spoke their rivalry out loud, back in the innocent days before anybody had a Stanley Cup, before anybody had Olympic gold, before anybody had 500 goals, before anybody had grey streaks through their hair, before anybody’s career had been threatened by injury, or before anybody — Ovechkin, mostly — had their heart broken, and broken again.
It was a one-sided rivalry, truth be told.
Pittsburgh beat Washington on the way to both of Crosby’s Cups. Crosby won those two Olympic golds, one in Russia. They have come a long way, these two, through Crosby’s concussions, and all of Ovie’s playoff losses. It has all added up, year by year. Scars.
And then Washington couldn’t score, and Pittsburgh did. Neither Ovechkin nor Crosby entered Game 7 at their peaks, the way they did in 2009.
Instead, they arrived closer to the end of the journey than the beginning, with Ovechkin a grey-haired situational third-liner, and Crosby, concussed and smashed in this series, back at the centre of hockey’s debate over brain injuries. One had leapt forward; the other had been pulled back into the past.
And then the other one was, too.