The Capitals were again on the wrong side of a coach's challenge on Saturday.
WASHINGTON — In the third period of Saturday's game between the Washington Capitals and Columbus Blue Jackets, Charlie Lindgren squeezed his legs together, trying to cover a puck that had rung off the post and ended up between his pads.
Then, the 29-year-old netminder felt another body on top of him and hit the ice, and a second later, the puck was in the back of the net, with Ivan Provorov scoring on a pretty much empty cage to pull the Blue Jackets within one.
Washington exhausted its sole timeout to take a longer look at the goal, and after looking at it with the video staff and speaking to Lindgren, decided to challenge for goaltender interference.
That challenge, like several this season, did not go in Washington's favor, and Ivan Provorov was credited with a good goal.
"I'm gonna say no comment on that one," Lindgren said postgame, but then added, "I mean it's no doubt it's tough. It puts the ref in a tough position, the game happens so fast. I can see it both ways, but yeah, it is what it is."
Head coach Spencer Carbery was also not elated with the call, which led to a delay of game penalty and a subsequent critical penalty kill. He called it into question again postgame and compared it to a goal that Nicklas Backstrom scored earlier in the season against the Toronto Maple Leafs that the war room in Toronto waved off for the same reason.
"So we needed some extra time because we wanted to look at it so we used our timeout and our video crew wanted to see a little bit more," Carbery explained. "The way that we saw it and we ended up definitively saying we're gonna challenge this is just to me and our video department, Olivier goes in there and he moves Lindgren. And I felt like that was the same as the O against Toronto and Joe Woll, right?
"Where he goes diving over Joe Woll, where the puck's kind of kicking around and then the two or three seconds of whatever time on the clock, then it's shot into the net, right? So O they determined was goalie interference because he went in there, he moved Joe Woll. But then like O's in the net, one one thousand, two one thousand and then it's shot in. I thought it was like the same situation, Olivier turning Chucky, puck's moving around but now he's in a different spot, puck goes in two seconds later."
The bench boss then explained the other side of it, but, ultimately, did not agree with that perspective.
"You can argue, 'Oh well, Chucky wouldn't be able to make that save,' but you don't know that because he's spun and now he's a little bit out of position," Carbery concluded. "So that's just the way we felt about it and Toronto disagreed, but that's up to Toronto."
In the end, Washington ultimately got another insurance goal from Hendrix Lapierre and fended off a late rally en route to a 4-3 victory.