The Capitals are searching for answers. Where should they start?

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WASHINGTON — Sometimes, the final score isn’t indicative of the hockey that preceded it.

We saw that in action on Tuesday night, when the Carolina Hurricanes needed overtime to beat the Washington Capitals 2-1, despite Carolina’s full-scale dominance in basically every facet of the game outside of goaltending.

So, it made sense that the next-day vibes were a little different on both sides. We’ll start with the team that needs to, uh, make some adjustments.

“It’s a lot of stuff,” Capitals coach Spencer Carbery said. “(To) summarize it and put it (in) probably in as basic terms as I possibly can, we can’t defend for the amount of time that we defended last night, be under attack for as long as we were, and expect to have success in this series. But we understand that Carolina and what they do, they’re going to control play for significant portions of the game. (Ninety-four) shot attempts, it was a little high.”

Indeed, a 94-34 edge in shot attempts is suboptimal for the team that has 34. In their regular-season games against each other, Carolina controlled about 60 percent of the shot attempts; that’s passable for Washington. On Tuesday, it was up to about 74 percent; that is not.

An enormous chunk of that disparity was built with Pierre-Luc Dubois, Tom Wilson and Connor McMichael on the ice for Washington. Given how well that line performed together in the regular season, watching it lose on shot attempts 23-2 and scoring chances 11-1 was almost startling.

Much of that also came with Washington defensemen John Carlson and Jakob Chychrun on the ice. Carolina’s top line (Sebastian Aho between Andrei Svechnikov and Jackson Blake) basically did as it pleased. Bad breakouts by the defensemen, bad puck management from the forwards when they managed to make it to the offensive zone — everything went wrong for Washington, and no player combo was more responsible than Carlson-Chychrun-Dubois-Wilson-McMichael.

Carbery said, unsurprisingly, that he’d consider lineup changes for Thursday’s Game 2.

“When you go through something like that, it makes you look at different options,” he said. “So that goes into systematic personnel, line combination, D-pair — all of it we’ll talk about, break down, and then figure out what we feel like is the best course of action for any type of alteration in (the lineup).”

It’s worth noting that the Chychrun-Carlson pairing is partially in place due to Martin Fehérváry’s season-ending injury, and that Chychrun wound up seeing 5 minutes, 40 seconds with Matt Roy (Fehérváry’s typical partner) down the stretch in Game 1. Carlson, meanwhile, had regular-season success with Rasmus Sandin. If Carbery is dedicated to keeping Trevor van Riemsdyk and Alex Alexeyev as his third pair, Chychrun-Roy and Carlson-Sandin as the top four would make some sense.

As for the forwards, Aliaksei Protas would seem like a candidate to rejoin the top six. He scored Washington’s only goal in Game 1 — and also played a part in setting up Carolina’s first, when he put a puck in Alexeyev’s feet deep in the defensive zone. It didn’t work out. Still, Protas is a potential difference-maker with a track record of success with Dubois and Wilson.

“We need to put more pressure on their defensemen,” Capitals center Nic Dowd said. “As you saw early in the second, we put pressure on their defensemen, they started coughing up pucks and then we had opportunities. We just didn’t do enough of that.

“It’s not saying we’re going to have 94 shot attempts like the Carolina Hurricanes. I don’t think that’s our game. But I think at the same point, we have to do a better job of stressing their defensemen in the offensive zone.”

Whatever Carbery chooses to do, a replay is not an option.

“That game’s over now. We’ve moved on,” Dowd said. “Like, we can learn from it, no question, but you can’t sulk on it.”

The flip side

The Hurricanes, meanwhile, deserve credit for sticking to their plan. They’ve lost their share of playoff games despite controlling the run of play, but on Tuesday, process led to results.

“I think last night there was just a sense of, I don’t know, calmness or what it was, but I felt like nobody was panicked,” Hurricanes winger Jordan Martinook said. “You just kind of felt like it was going to come. Sometimes it’s hard to explain those feelings. But it didn’t feel like anybody was frustrated on the bench or anything.

“And I think we’ve played this way long enough, that you know you’re going to kind of create a break or make your breaks by the way you’re playing. And I felt like last night was kind of a prime example of how you stick with what we do and then you’ll get rewarded for it.”

Hurricanes injury update

Hurricanes fourth-line center Mark Jankowski, who left the game in the second period, is “definitely better” and will likely be a game-time decision for Game 2 on Thursday night, Brind’Amour said.

After Jankowski left, Carolina basically ran three lines, with William Carrier and Eric Robinson each only logging about three more minutes of ice time.

(Photo of Washington’s Matt Roy and Carolina’s Sean Walker: Scott Taetsch / Getty Images)

This news was originally published on this post .

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