Olie Kolzig called it probably the wackiest game he had seen. Glen Hanlon said it felt like a pee-wee game at the end.
After 54 scoreless minutes, the Washington Capitals and Calgary Flames unleashed a six-goal flurry, capped by Jaromir Jagr’s answered prayer from behind the goal line with eight-tenths of a second left, to forge a 3-3 tie last night at MCI Center.
“You can’t describe that last five minutes,” said Caps goalie Kolzig, who tied a season-high with 41 saves. “It definitely felt like a playoff game, 0-0 for the longest time. … To lose the way we might have lost would have been unbearable. Their excuse was that it was their third game in four nights, and they had to travel. We had no excuse. We’re in desperate times, and we basically gave a point away.”
Still, a 2-1-1 homestand gave the cellar-dwelling Caps (13-26-5-1) their first three-game unbeaten streak of the season.
“It’s a point that we’ll take,” said Hanlon, Washington’s coach. “It was Olie’s night, but we didn’t get the type of defensive effort that we needed. He gave us an opportunity to win. I’m glad we got the tie. For Olie to play that well and not come away with at least a tie would have been disheartening.”
That’s true even though overtime losses are worth as much as a tie — which wasn’t assured until the Caps killed a tripping penalty on Joel Kwiatkowski with 1:33 left in overtime and an unsportsmanlike conduct call on Trent Whitfield that left them two men down for the final seven seconds.
But this was a night in which the tying goal was scored from an angle impossible for anyone except perhaps five-time scoring champion Jagr.
“I had no choice,” Jagr said. “I knew there was no time left. It was just a lucky shot.”
Frustrated Flames goalie Jamie McLennan, who thought he had the post covered but had the puck bounce off his left knee and into the net, described Jagr’s goal as “a million to one shot.”
The Caps, the NHL’s second-most porous team during the first half of the season, had allowed four goals — including an empty-netter — during the four-game homestand before the wild end of regulation.
Calgary’s Jarome Iginla seemingly had pulled out a 3-2 victory for the Flames, beating Jason Doig to a loose puck and lifting it past Kolzig with 38.6 seconds left for his sixth goal and 12th point in the last six games.
Calgary’s Matthew Lombardi and Oleg Saprykin beat Kolzig in a 29-second span to give the Flames a 2-1 lead, but Washington’s Sergei Gonchar tied it with a blast from the left point with 1:00 remaining.
Whitfield broke the scoreless tie with his first goal of the year on a play set up by Mike Grier and Jeff Halpern with just 5:37 remaining. But 59 seconds later, Kolzig gave up a rebound, and Lombardi knocked the puck off Kolzig’s left leg and in despite what could have been called a high stick. Just 29 seconds later, Saprykin stuffed a rebound of Iginla’s shot past Kolzig, who had a scoreless streak of 169:20 halted by the sudden goals.
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