Braden Holtby’s lone lapse costs Capitals in loss against Red Wings
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Version 0 of 1. DETROIT — Braden Holtby stared down for several seconds, as if in disbelief. No puck had gotten past the Washington Capitals goaltender until that point, and he had looked so sharp that it started to seem unlikely one would. But then Andreas Athanasiou flung a puck from the left of the net along the goal line and it found the tiniest of windows, a hole between Holtby’s pad and the ice. He looked down at his side, maybe hoping to see the puck still safely out of the net. It was a window Holtby had sealed dozens of times before, but the disc was behind him, giving the Detroit Red Wings a third-period lead en route to a 1-0 win. The night started with the attention on a record and Capitals star Alex Ovechkin, but it ended as one where Washington couldn’t score and capitalize on an impressive performance by Holtby, somehow outshined by the goaltender in the net opposite him. “I’ve played that shot a thousand times and never had a puck go in there,” Holtby said. “I don’t know why my pad came off the ice. . . . It was a goal that shouldn’t go in, but at the same time, I play that the same way every time.” With 5 minutes 8 seconds left in the third period, the Red Wings got called for a delay of game penalty, giving the Capitals’ power play a chance to tie the game. Ovechkin fired four shots on goal, but all were saved. For one Ovechkin one-timer, Detroit goaltender Petr Mrazek stepped forward to block the powerful shot with his body. Mrazek finished with 38 saves, 17 of which came in the third period. Ovechkin tied his career high with a whopping 15 shots on goal in his quest to surpass Sergei Fedorov for the most NHL goals by a Russian-born player, but he and the Capitals were shut out. “I think on the power play, we had pretty good chances to score,” Ovechkin said. “But we didn’t.” Ovechkin had been asked about approaching Fedorov’s record for weeks, the questions becoming more frequent the closer he got to Fedorov’s total of 483. Finally, he matched the record with a power-play goal against the Toronto Maple Leafs on Saturday, a game Fedorov watched. Ovechkin started to get exasperated with the spotlight on the record. On Tuesday morning, he said there had been too much talk around it, as he was constantly being asked what breaking it would mean. He acknowledged that passing Fedorov — a mentor and former teammate who also spent 13 seasons with the Red Wings — in Detroit with Fedorov in attendance would be “pretty cool.” Before the game, Fedorov stopped by the Washington locker room to greet Ovechkin, and Ovechkin appeared driven to get his 484th goal over with in the first period. The Capitals had 15 shots on goal, and Ovechkin accounted for six of them. He had two shot attempts go wide on Washington’s two power-play chances in the first period. Ovechkin’s best chance came when defenseman John Carlson fed him the puck in front of the crease with less than three minutes left in the period, with just Mrazek in front of him. Mrazek blocked the wrist shot with his chest. “He had some good looks,” Capitals Coach Barry Trotz said of Ovechkin. “There was a couple pucks that looked like they were going right in the net, then they just got tipped or something just got a little piece of it and it’d miss by an inch or two. It’s a game of inches sometimes. Sometimes they go in and sometimes they miss.” Though the Capitals (10-4-0) couldn’t capitalize on two tripping penalties called on Red Wings defenseman Jakub Kindl, Washington also caught a couple breaks. The referees reviewed a play from the first three minutes of the game when a Red Wings shot appeared to have possibly snuck into the goal under Holtby’s glove, but the review was inconclusive, so the no-goal call stood. Through two periods, Holtby had put together arguably his strongest performance of the season, saving all 18 shots on goal. With less than a minute left in the first period, he stopped a point-blank wraparound wrist shot by Tomas Tatar with his pad. In the second period, the Red Wings (8-6-1) controlled possession of the puck and continued to hammer Holtby. Each Detroit shot was met with gasps in Joe Louis Arena, then groans would typically follow as Holtby kept the game scoreless. Less than five minutes into the second period, Holtby saved three shots in 20 seconds. But the Capitals were living on borrowed time, unable to give Holtby a cushion, and in the third period, a puck got through with Holtby wondering where the hole even was. “That was one of the best goalie duels I’ve seen in a long time,” defenseman Karl Alzner said. “He was the only reason we were in that game the entire game. They had some point-blank chances and slap shots from the hash marks, and I shook my head a couple times, thinking I don’t even know how he’s reacting to it.” |