Takeaways: Hurricanes stay undefeated at home, push Ovechkin’s Capitals to brink

After a sterling 2024-25 campaign that made the Washington Capitals the story of the season, Alex Ovechkin’s club finds itself one loss away from a second-round exit.

Much was made of the single-summer turnaround that transformed the Caps into an Eastern Conference behemoth, just a year removed from clawing their way into the 2024 playoffs right before the doors closed. A five-game series victory over the Montreal Canadiens last month had the Caps faithful eyeing a deep post-season run for the first time since Washington’s title-winning march in 2018. 

But the Canes, nearing the end of their seventh-straight second-round appearance, have served Ovechkin and Co. a reality check, putting up back-to-back drubbings to earn a 3-1 series lead and push Washington to the brink of elimination.

Monday’s addition to the pile — a 5-2 Canes victory that saw the Caps twice pull within a goal before Carolina put it out of reach — continued one particularly dominant trend that’s taken shape through a round-and-a-half: Through five games at home in these playoffs, the Canes are a perfect 5-0, neither the New Jersey Devils nor the Caps able to get the better of Carolina’s home cooking.

The five-game home streak to start the post-season is the fourth-longest such streak any playoff club has strung together in the past decade. The leader on that list? Carolina, just a few years ago (seven straight home wins, 2022).

That’s bad news for Ovechkin’s squad. Because while the series moves back to D.C. for a Game 5 that could keep Washington’s season alive, the Caps would have to win under the Lenovo Center lights in Raleigh — and upend the Canes’ streak of home-ice dominance — to force a Game 7.

Before we get there, let’s take a look at how Carolina took Game 4 on Monday night.

Canes continue to overwhelm Capitals with shot-attempts onslaught

Heading into Game 4, there was plenty of discussion about Carolina’s volume-shooting mentality, particularly the club’s affinity for racking up wild numbers of shot attempts through an unending stream of pucks fired at the cage.

In Game 1 against Washington, Carolina amassed a staggering 94 attempts to the Capitals’ 34. Over the first three games in total, the Canes managed 256 shot attempts, nearly doubling the Caps’ 133. 

Game 4 was a similar story. While Washington upped their output, managing a series-high 55 shot attempts, the Hurricanes still finished far ahead with 73, outpacing in terms of shots on goal by a margin of 37-21, too.

While the approach doesn’t necessarily mean Brind’Amour’s squad has been racking up quality opportunity after quality opportunity, the relentless shooting does serve another purpose, according to his opposing coach — it wears teams down.

“When you look at the shot attempts, sometimes they’re jaw-dropping,” Caps head coach Spencer Carbery said of the Canes’ volume shooting earlier in the series. “And when they flash across the screen, people are like, ‘Whoa, that doesn’t seem to look good.’ Which I agree with — but we’ve played Carolina long enough to know that … when you look into the quality looks, you can take a little bit of, ‘Okay, it wasn’t that bad, even though it felt a lot worse.’ If you dig into the successes of their system, one of the reasons is — as a coach, as a player, as a fan — when you’re watching that transpire, you’re like, ‘Holy, this team is absolutely crushing the other team.’ When, if you look at the odds of some of those shots going in, they’re not high, on a goaltender at this level. 

“But what they do is it stresses you — it stresses your team, it stresses your coach. Usually, when you do that, when you’re applying pressure to someone, eventually you crack.”

Andersen finally beaten, but remains in dominant form for surging Canes

While the Caps are trying to navigate the chaos of Carolina’s offensive approach, the situation hasn’t been much better for them on the other end of the sheet.

Frederik Andersen has been among the best netminders in the post-season to this point — coming into Game 4, the 35-year-old sported a league-leading .940 save percentage, and was fresh off a Game 3 shutout that helped his club pull ahead in the series. That streak extended to five goalless periods Monday before Washington was finally able to get a puck past the Great Dane.

Still, with his squad seemingly on the cusp of a ticket to the Conference Final, Andersen now sports an elite .935 save percentage, which ranks among the best marks of his playoff career. In all, he extended his shutout streak to just over 118 minutes before Jakob Chychrun beat him in the third period Monday night — the longest such streak of his career. 

The blue-liners in front of Andersen have been making their presence known too — aside from the three-goal Game 2 that earned Washington its lone win, the Canes’ defence has held the Caps’ scorers to two or fewer goals in three of four games in this series. The same was true Monday, where Carolina’s blue line — courtesy of tallies from Shayne Gostisbehere and Sean Walker — managed as many goals as a Washington offence that ranked second-best league-wide during the regular season.

Ovechkin finally breaks through, but it may be too late

If there’s one positive the visitors can take from the tilt, it’s the signs of life seen from their captain.

Coming into Game 4, things were looking dismal for the league’s all-time goal-scoring king. After potting four goals through five games against the Montreal Canadiens in Round 1, Alex Ovechkin came into Monday’s Game 4 goalless in three straight. More worrying, the chances had dried up too. The Great Eight had hit the net just eight times through three games. After managing five one-timer attempts in Round 1, per the broadcast, he had none in Games 1-3 in Round 2.

But late in the third period of Game 4, with his team’s season on the line, the captain finally found his touch — wiring a blistering one-timer past Andersen to net his first goal of the series, pulling the Capitals within a goal with time to tie it up.

It was a crucial moment for Washington’s power play, too — the Caps’ man-advantage unit had gone 4-for-20 through the post-season up until this night, their four power-play markers the fewest among any remaining playoff squad. They’d come up short time and time again throughout Game 4 as well. On the other side of the ledger, the Canes had allowed just one power-play goal against, on 22 opportunities, before Ovechkin’s third-period marker.

It took a five-on-three opportunity to break through, but the Caps found one when they seemingly needed one most. Unfortunately for Carbery’s squad, it took only four-and-a-half minutes for the Canes to douse the comeback attempt, with Walker scoring to restore Carolina’s 4-2 lead, and the home side adding an empty-netter before all was said and done.

If Ovechkin can carry the breakthrough into Game 5 and build on it, perhaps the Caps found something to hold onto Monday night. But the fact it came this late in the series — four games and three losses in — may render it all a footnote before the week is through.