Caps stomp the champs: Tuch debuts in style, Hurricanes get flattened
Alex Tuch scored twice in his Capitals debut as Washington opened the season by routing the defending champion Hurricanes 5-2 in Raleigh.
CapitalsWelcome to a new series. After every Capitals game this season, win or lose, I'll be right here with the postgame breakdown. Not from the press box. From the seats. I'm a season ticket holder, I've paid for these seats, and I've earned the right to cheer, groan and second-guess like every other Caps fan in this town. Read more: Capitals Hurricanes season opener
The good, the bad and the ugly. Who's hot, who's not. Who played great and who stunk up the place. Every game, no filter. Let's go!
Carolina who?
Opening night. On the road. In the building where Carolina just raised its Stanley Cup banner, against the same team that bounced us out of the playoffs two springs ago.
And the Washington Capitals walked into Lenovo Center Friday night and stomped the champs 5-2 like Godzilla strolling through downtown Raleigh.
Related: Godzilla's favorite college football picks
Four unanswered goals before the Hurricanes knew what hit them. One game, two points, first place. I'll take it. Sure, we can get damn excited after one game!
The good
Alex Tuch. What a debut. Two goals in his first game in a Caps sweater, a wrister at 6:33 to open the scoring and a backhander late in the first.
The sign-and-trade with Buffalo looks like a heist this morning. And who set him up on goal one? Alex Ovechkin. Forty-one years old, season number 22, still feeding the puck to the new guy like he's been doing it forever. Loved it!
That first period was the best 20 minutes I've seen from this team in a long time. Three-zip at intermission. Pierre-Luc Dubois had two helpers and was a force down the middle. Cole Hutson buried a snap shot for 2-0. Jakob Chychrun ripped a power-play goal 1:36 into the second to make it 4-0, and added an assist.
It's a beautiful thing, watching Carolina Caniac fans wince like, whoa, who are these guys?
And Ryan Leonard. Carolina finally scores late in the second, the crowd wakes up, and eight seconds later Leonard kills the party. That's a response goal. That's what good teams do. Douse the fire!
Logan Thompson: 31 saves, calm as a Sunday morning. The guys in front of him blocked 28 shots. That's commitment.
The bad
The penalty box. We lived in it. Carolina outshot us 33-27, and that's almost entirely on our discipline, including a bench minor in the first. You can get away with that against a hungover champ. You do not get away with it against Kucherov and the Tampa power play.
We also stopped shooting in the third. Zero goals, sitting on the lead. It worked last night. It won't work every night. Turn up the volume, keep up the energy and step on their neck.
The ugly
Chychrun's sideboards giveaway to Jordan Martinook in the first. Gift-wrapped semi-breakaway. Thompson bailed him out, and if that goes in, maybe this is a different night. Clean it up, Jakob. You were great otherwise, so I'll be gentle. It's game one.
Who's up, who's down
Up: Tuch, Thompson, Leonard, Dubois. Down: the Hurricanes, who are 0-1-1 and look like they're still at the parade.
Who's hot, who's not
Hot: the top line. Tuch, Dubois and Tom Wilson combined on that third goal and looked like they've played together for years. Not: our penalty kill's workload. Too many shifts, too many legs burned. Clean it up.
Played great, stunk it up
He played great: Tuch. Easy call. Two goals in game one, and a statement to every Caps fan wondering what we got this summer. Who stunk up the place: honestly, nobody. When you beat the Cup champs by three on their own ice, there's no goat. The closest thing is the penalty box door, which got opened far too often. Keep it shut.
Excited or depressed
Excited. Fired up. It's one game out of 82 and I know it, but you couldn't script a better start. New faces producing, kids scoring, the goalie locked in, and the Great Eight still pulling the strings.
Next up
Tonight at 7 p.m. Eastern in Tampa, the second half of a back-to-back, against a Lightning team and a Vasilevskiy who got smoked 5-1 in New York and will be angry.
Second game in 24 hours. Get used to it. Stay out of the box, make Vasy move side to side, and we head home 2-0.
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.
