Five straight goals. That is what relief looks like when you have spent the first two weeks of a season scoring one goal a night and wondering when, exactly, the dam was going to break. The Los Angeles Kings finally broke through on Tuesday night at Capital One Arena, beating the Washington Capitals 5-2 for their first win of the season, according to NHL.com's recap by Harvey Valentine — and they did it the hard way, spotting Washington a 2-0 lead before scoring five times without an answer.
The Kings improved to 1-4-2 with the win, the first under head coach Peter Laviolette, per NHL.com. That record still looks ugly in the standings, and nobody in the Los Angeles dressing room is pretending otherwise. But there is a difference between a team that cannot score and a team that has not scored yet, and Tuesday was the night the Kings proved — mostly to themselves — that they belong in the second category. They had scored exactly one goal in each of their previous four games, a stretch that turns every early deficit into a crisis. When Washington went up 2-0 in the first period, this had all the makings of a fifth straight night of the same story.
Two goals in 31 seconds changed everything
Washington's start was everything the Capitals could have asked for. Ryan Leonard opened the scoring at 9:25 of the first period, snapping a shot through a screen to make it 1-0, NHL.com reported. Cole Hutson doubled the lead on the power play at 18:35, and with less than ninety seconds left in the period the Capitals were in complete control of a game against a winless opponent that could not buy a goal.
Then the Kings scored twice in 31 seconds in the final minute of the first period, and the entire night flipped. Instead of heading to the intermission down two and tightening up — the way winless teams do — Los Angeles went into the room tied, with momentum, belief, and a bench that suddenly sounded a lot louder. It is impossible to overstate what that minute does for a group that had managed four goals in its previous four games combined. The season did not turn in the second or third period. It turned right there.
From that point the Kings pulled away, scoring five straight in total to close out a 5-2 win. Adrian Kempe scored twice to lead the way, Artemi Panarin finished with a goal and two assists, and Alex Laferriere added two assists, per NHL.com. Darcy Kuemper made 30 saves against his former team — the kind of steady, unspectacular, exactly-what-you-need goaltending that lets a fragile team exhale and play its game instead of chasing the night.
Kuemper: "Now we just got to get rolling"
Kuemper, to his credit, did not oversell one win in October, but he did name the thing everyone around this team has been feeling. "I don't think it's unusual for teams to go on losing streaks throughout the year, but when it's at the start of the year, it gets magnified," Kuemper said, via NHL.com. "Nice to get a win, and now we just got to get rolling."
He is right about the magnification, too. A four-game skid in January is a bad week. The same skid to open a season becomes a referendum on the coach, the roster, and the whole direction of the franchise — especially when that coach is new, as Laviolette is in Los Angeles. Every day without a win adds a layer of questions, and the questions themselves start to become part of the problem. That is why the first win matters out of all proportion to its two points. It clears the air. Practice gets lighter. The video sessions stop feeling like inquests. You can read more of our hockey coverage on the Previously sports front, where the early-season picture across the league is starting to take shape.
Washington's missed chance
For the Capitals, this one will sting precisely because it was there to be closed out. Washington fell to 5-4-0 and had a two-game winning streak snapped, per NHL.com. Logan Thompson made 21 saves, and the Capitals got their goals from Leonard and Hutson — a pair of young players giving the home crowd exactly the start it wanted. You could not script a better first period for a team facing a desperate opponent.
Dylan Strome's postgame read, via NHL.com, was telling: "I felt like we did what we wanted to for the most part. They were opportunistic and we didn't score on our chances tonight." There is truth in that — Washington generated chances and Kuemper was good — but there is also a warning in it. Good teams at home, up 2-0 late in the first against a winless visitor, do not give up two goals in 31 seconds. That minute is the game, and the Capitals know it. The lesson travels with them even if the standings hit, at 5-4-0, is survivable.
What it means from here
One win does not fix a 1-4-2 start, and the Kings still have to prove Tuesday was a beginning rather than a blip. The encouraging part is the shape of it: the goals came in a rush, the best players — Kempe and Panarin — drove them, the goaltender held the line early when the game could have gotten away, and the response to a 2-0 hole was aggression instead of resignation. Those are team traits, not luck.
It also reframes the conversation around Laviolette's group. The question coming into Washington was whether the Kings could score at all. The question leaving Washington is whether they can do it again on Thursday, and then again on the weekend. That is a much better question to be answering. The monkey, as players love to say, is off the back. Now comes the part where they find out what kind of team they actually are — with the pressure of winless finally, mercifully, gone.
For Washington, the fix is simpler and more annoying: close. The Capitals have a winning record, a productive young core showing up on the scoresheet, and a goaltender who gave them a chance. What they did not have Tuesday was the killer minute — the shift after a goal, the lockdown last minute of a period — that separates a comfortable home win from a collapse people write about. They will get chances to prove it was a one-off. The Kings, meanwhile, finally get to play a hockey game without the weight of zero in the win column. Watch what that freedom does for them.
