Behind the glass: Kings 5, Capitals 2 — Caps cough up early lead, crown winless Kings
The Caps led the winless Kings 2-0 late in the first, gave up two goals in 31 seconds and never scored again in a 5-2 loss at The Fortress.
CapitalsWASHINGTON, D.C. -- For the first 19-plus minutes of the opening period against the winless Los Angeles Kings on Tuesday night in The Fortress, the Washington Capitals looked like a serious Cup contender.
Brutally physical, faster than normal and playing with pure aggression, the Caps built a 2-0 lead on a hapless and winless Kings team. Life was good.
Then, in the final seconds of the opening period, as we got ready for a bathroom and beer run, they coughed up the lead like a hairball.
Sloppy play and lost focus allowed the Kings to bounce into the first intermission tied rather than facing a 2-0 deficit in one of the toughest arenas for a road team to play in the league.
From my seats behind the glass, you could feel the air leak out of the building. Two goals in 31 seconds — Adrian Kempe with 33 ticks left, Artemi Panarin with two — and a team that had scored exactly one goal in each of its previous four games suddenly believed. The Kings never looked back, scoring five straight to win 5-2 and grab their first victory of the season. Congratulations, Caps. You just became the answer to a trivia question.
The great
Ryan Leonard. The kid keeps delivering. He opened the scoring at 9:25, cutting into the high slot and ripping one through a screen past Darcy Kuemper. That’s four goals on the year and goals in back-to-back games. He earned the third star, and for most of the night he looked like the best Cap on the ice.
The good
Cole Hutson. The young defenseman beat Alex Laferriere at the blue line on the power play, walked down the slot and snapped one past Kuemper from the edge of the right circle with 1:25 left in the first. Poise beyond his years. And for the record, the Caps outshot the Kings 32-26. Effort wasn’t the problem. Finishing and focus were. This is on head coach Spencer Carbery. Fix it.
The bad
The last 33 seconds of the first period. Unforgivable. You’re up 2-0 on the only winless team in hockey with half a minute to go. You chip it out, you change, you go to the room. Instead, Kempe finished a 2-on-1 with Panarin from the left dot, and then a Mikey Anderson forecheck forced a Jonny Brodzinski turnover along the left wall and Panarin ripped the loose puck from the left circle with two seconds on the clock. Panarin has been tormenting this franchise for years — 41 regular-season points in 39 career games against Washington — and he finished with a goal and two assists.
Then came the third. Erik Gustafsson, a defenseman who hadn’t scored a goal since January 2025, went coast to coast on the power play, split two Caps, deked Logan Thompson and beat him at 7:28. Kempe added his second a little over four minutes later off a Panarin feed, and Scott Laughton hit the empty net to seal it.
The ugly
Twenty giveaways. Two goals on 32 shots. A 1-for-4 power play. And the guy who stoned us? Darcy Kuemper, the former Cap, who stopped 30 of 32 against his old team. That one hurts.
Thompson made 21 saves on 25 shots and didn’t get much help in front of him. Sad.
Who’s up, who’s down
Hot: Leonard and Hutson. The future is skating right in front of us. It’s a beautiful thing.
Not: Alex Ovechkin — two shots, no points, minus-1. Dylan Strome put four shots on net and won 9 of 17 draws but couldn’t find the scoresheet. Alex Tuch coughed it up three times. And a scoreless second period, when the Caps had a wounded Kings team on the ropes and Quinton Byfield already out of the game, was a missed opportunity to put this one away.
Fans excited or depressed?
Depressed? Not yet. Annoyed? Absolutely. The Caps fall to 5-4-0 and 2-1 on this five-game homestand. Losing to a team that hadn’t won a single game is the kind of night that stings all the way home on the Metro.
Next up
The Buffalo Sabres come to The Fortress on Saturday night at 7 p.m. The Caps need to play 60 minutes, not 19 and a half. Bounce back, or the boo birds start warming up.
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John Fredericks is the publisher of Disruptor Sports and the founder of the John Fredericks Media Network. He hosts The John Fredericks Show weekday mornings across the network's stations, and on Saturdays he is Godzilla, host of Godzilla Wins, the network's NFL and fantasy football show. Every one of his picks lives on the Godzilla Wins picks page, record and all. The desk's model has its own read on every game on The Card.
This column was written by John Fredericks. It was fact-checked and copy edited by the Disruptor Sports desk working with Claude, a generative AI model made by Anthropic. How our newsroom works.
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