Written by Allan Muir at SI.com
Patric Hornqvist pounced on a careless clearing attempt and beat Braden Holtby at 2:34 of overtime to give the Pittsburgh Penguins a 3–2 victory over the Washington Capitals in Game 4 of their second-round playoff series Wednesday night.
Trevor Daley and Matt Cullen also scored for Pittsburgh. Jay Beagle and John Carlson replied for the Capitals.
With the win, the Pens take a commanding 3–1 series and push the Presidents’ Trophy winners to the brink of elimination. The two sides will have an extra day to recover before Game 5 goes Saturday at Verizon Center.
Here are three thoughts on this critical swing game.
Missed opportunity
This is one the Capitals had to have. Had to. And they just couldn’t take it.
Pittsburgh’s best defenseman, Kris Letang, was watching from the press box as he served his one-game suspension. Olli Maatta, another top-four D, was out recovering from an “upper-body injury,” leaving the Caps to face a defense that looked like this:
Dumoulin-Daley
Pouliot-Lovejoy
Cole-Schultz
These were legitimate NHL players, not a bunch of beer leaguers. But on a night when rookie goaltender Matt Murray looked more human than he has at any point in this series, pumping out rebounds and scrambling to cover his angles, it should have been a rout. And early on, it looked like it could be. The Caps got on the board first when Jay Beagle took advantage of a misread by Pouliot and Lovejoy in the neutral zone and broke in untouched before beating Murray with a bad-angle backhand just 2:58 in.
For a brief spell, they were able to employ the dump-and-chase-and-obliterate game plan designed to wear that group out. But they got too aggressive, sending three forwards deep on the forecheck. That created massive gaps for the Pens to exploit in transition, which left the Caps chasing the puck into their own end more often than into the offensive corners.
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