Kolzig, Capitals fall amid flurry of shots

RALEIGH, N.C. — After one goal, Boyd Gordon lay motionless on his stomach for several seconds. Moments later goaltender Olie Kolzig splintered his stick with an overhand whack at the crossbar and subsequent mash on the ice for good measure.

In a game the Washington Capitals needed badly, their frustration began to boil over.

Washington stayed with surging Carolina for a little more than half of yesterday’s critical Southeast Division game, but the Hurricanes’ offensive onslaught proved too much in a 6-3 loss at RBC Center.

“You can’t just do it for 20 minutes and then when you face a little bit of adversity, start getting down and looking for excuses, whether it be yelling at the refs or right or wrong and we did,” Caps coach Bruce Boudreau said. “Instead of pushing back, we felt bad for ourselves. We felt we were getting shortchanged for whatever reason, and when that happens you’re not going to be successful.”

With the loss, the Caps fell six points behind the division-leading Hurricanes, though the team does have three games in hand. One of those is this afternoon at Verizon Center against the New Jersey Devils, the top team in the Atlantic Division.

Carolina peppered Kolzig with 42 shots, a touch off their pace from the previous two games but enough to have more than 40 in three straight games for the first time since 1987, when the franchise was in Hartford, Conn.

The Caps entered the game perfect in their past 22 penalty-killing situations, while the Hurricanes had not scored with the extra man in 17 tries. Both of those trends ended emphatically. Carolina scored four power-play goals, the most Washington has allowed all season.

Matt Cullen scored the first two, both were helped by a pair of untimely breaks. Tom Poti’s stick snapped before Cullen’s first score (Poti was furious that a slash was not called and had to be restrained by an official after the goal) and Milan Jurcina’s busted shortly before the second one.

“It was tough enough to beat the Hurricanes, but we had to beat the refs tonight to and we couldn’t do that,” Poti said. “We came out in the first period with a lot of emotion, but it we took too many penalties and it killed us.”

The last three extra-man goals were emblematic of another seismic problem last night for the Caps — they all came on rebounds.

In fact, each of the final five Carolina goals came after Kolzig made the first save.

“We were soft in front of our net all night long,” Boudreau said. “They had second and third and fourth chances. … Those pucks should have been cleared. That’s the reason Olie was mad.”

Alex Ovechkin did not snap his season-long goal drought, which is now at four games. But he did assist on all three of Washington’s goals and moved to within one point of Pittsburgh’s Evgeni Malkin for the NHL scoring lead.

Mike Green put the Caps on the board first. Ovechkin and Green criss-crossed during a rush and Ovechkin — the NHL’s leader in shots — elected to feed the puck to Green, who slipped a backhanded shot between Carolina goaltender Cam Ward’s legs for his 16th of the season.

After Cullen’s first goal, Alexander Semin gave Washington the lead back less than three minutes later. When Eric Staal laid an open-ice hit on Ovechkin during a power play, it left Semin an opening to skate into and his shot hit a stick on the way in.

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