4 takeaways from the Capitals’ Game 4 win in the Stanley Cup Final

The Washington Capitals have taken a decisive 3-1 series lead and are one win away from their first-ever Stanley Cup victory. Alex Ovechkin and company dominated on the scoreboard, but Game 4 was hard-fought, with tensions overflowing by the third period.

The Golden Knights aren’t used to losing and leaned on physicality when they fell out of the race tonight. Ryan Reaves, Deryk Engelland, and the Capitals’ T.J. Oshie were all handed game misconducts before the final buzzer.

The Knights are feeling the heat as the series heads back to the desert for Game 5. They’ve got work to do to dig themselves out of this hole. For the Capitals, they’re just looking to keep rolling and end this on Thursday night.

Here are four takeaways from Game 4:

Though the scoreboard doesn’t show it, the Knights didn’t have a terrible game. In fact, they came out of the gate ready to take on the Caps and put up a flurry of shots early in the first period. A huge opportunity came just four minutes into the game when John Carlson headed to the box for tripping.

The resulting power play could’ve tilted the ice in the Knights’ favor, especially when James Neal found himself staring at a wide open net. But an unlucky ping off the far post shifted momentum for the Knights in the wrong direction.

Alex Tuch followed up by hitting a post of his own, making two of the three shots from that power play incredibly unlucky. Overall, the Knights put up 29 shots, scoring just two goals, compared to the Capitals’ six goals on 24 shots.

Marc-Andre Fleury played out of his mind over the three rounds that led the Knights to the Cup Final in their first season, putting up an insane .947 save percentage. That number just isn’t sustainable, especially when Fleury’s career playoff save percentage was sitting at a much-more realistic .913 going into tonight.

Over the course of this series, Fleury has come back down to Earth. His .857 SV% in Game 1 and .885 in Games 2 and 3 have shown that the Caps can crack the great golden wall. With a .750 save percentage and six goals against tonight, he’ll need to bounce back in a big way to keep the Knights in this series.

This third period goal from Michal Kempny off a feed from Nicklas Backstrom is one in particular that Fleury is going to want to take back:

During today’s morning skate, Andre Burakovsky hit Devante Smith-Pelly in the face with a puck, but a glued-together face wound didn’t keep Smith-Pelly from making himself known. He scored this beauty of a goal to put the Caps up, 3-0, as the first period wound down.

Over 75 regular season games this year, Smith-Pelly totaled seven goals. He now has six in 23 playoff games and one in each of the last two.

The Capitals won the special teams battle tonight and it wasn’t even close. Vegas earned four power play opportunities and scored on exactly none of them — though James Neal’s third period goal was tallied just after the tripping penalty to Backstrom expired, making it at least special teams-influenced.

Meanwhile, Washington went three-for-five on the man-advantage, with an opening goal from Oshie, a 5-on-3 goal from Brett Connolly, and this full-team effort from defenseman John Carlson:

This may not be the strongest Capitals squad we’ve seen in the last few years — they didn’t win the President’s Trophy for a third year in a row, after all — but they’re consistent and their core has found an undeniable chemistry that proves their spot in the Final is far from a fluke.