The Blackhawks led 2-0 less than a minute into the second period thanks to goals from Brandon Saad and Duncan Keith; however, it was all Washington after that as the Capitals scored three unanswered to edge Chicago 3-2 Friday night.
Andre Burakovsky’s third of the season got the Capitals on the board at 15:03 of the second.
Washington then scored twice in a 42-second span to take the lead.
Marcus Johansson tied it 2-2 with his sixth of the season and Joel Ward scored the eventual game-winner with five seconds remaining in the middle frame.
“That’s big when you’ve been struggling a little bit,” Caps coach Barry Trotz said of Washington snapping its’ five game skid. “You could tell, we’ve lost a number of games here [despite] playing pretty well, then losing some games here, when things aren’t going [our] way, you sort of don’t trust yourself confidence-wise. Obviously getting this one will hopefully boost our confidence, and we can go forward.”
Saad opened the scoring at 17:12 of the first, with his second of the season.
Then after Alex Ovechkin was whistled for an illegal check to the head on Blackhawks’ defenseman Niklas Hjalmarsson, Keith gave the Blackhawks a 2-0 lead with a power play marker.
With the loss, Chicago has just one win in four games.
"(We’ve got) a 2-0 lead, giving up nothing, make a bad decision and it’s in our net, and it’s in our net and in our net,” Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville said. “We played a perfect 35 minutes and then we basically shot ourselves in the foot with mental mistakes. A couple of plays were totally unacceptable. The last (goal) at the end of the period was tough to give up.”
Chicago captain Jonathan Toews said they sat back and allowed the Capitals to take over.
“I don’t think it’s anything that they took from us as much as it is us letting up and kind of getting away from our pace and giving them chances that we didn’t make them earn, so we can’t be happy with that,” Toews Said. “I think we just got satisfied for a short amount of time. I think we felt comfortable with our 2-0 lead and it came back to bite us. We can’t be happy with that. It’s something we need to deal with and learn from right away and not let that happen again.”
Braden Holtby made 38 saves for the win while Corey Crawford stopped 21 shots in a losing cause.