Big hits, big goals, big win for Capitals

LAS VEGAS » Winning a Stanley Cup isn’t meant to be easy, something that even the novice hockey fans in Las Vegas now surely understand.

No need to tell it to the Washington Capitals. They’ve spent 43 seasons chasing the elusive Cup, only to find an expansion team — of all things — in the way of finally ending the drought.

The battle for hockey supremacy heads to the nation’s capital all tied up 1-1 after a pair of games as entertaining as anything on the Las Vegas Strip. The goals keep coming and so do the hits, including one Wednesday night on Evgeny Kuznetsov that both knocked him out of the game and seemed to wake Washington out of its daze.

Their top playoff scorer out, the Caps rallied for three straight goals that stopped — at least for a moment — a team that has been virtually unstoppable throughout the playoffs.

“It galvanized us as a group,” Caps coach Barry Trotz said. “I think it might be a turning point for us.”

On a night when Alex Ovech-

kin scored the first Stanley Cup Final goal of his 13year NHL career to give the Caps a lead they somehow managed to hold onto even while being outplayed and outshot by the Knights in the third period, Washington won a final-round game for the first time ever to make the flight back home a lot sweeter.

For the Capitals it means service held, with the next two games in far friendlier confines at home.

For the Knights, it was a golden opportunity gone awry.

They were 7-1 in the playoffs at home, 11-1 overall when scoring the first goal. So when James Neal scored barely eight minutes into the game, the party was on.

And then, suddenly, was off. At least for now.

Credit some of that to the resilience of the Caps, who were down a goal when Kuznetsov was knocked out of the game. Give a tip of the hat to Ovechkin, too, who scored the go-ahead goal in the second period. it