The little things in life sometimes can make the biggest differences.
Take the Stanley Cup playoffs, for instance. Two teams can battle for more than three periods of rugged, in-your-face hockey and what wins it in the end? A tiny tip on a shot from the right boards.
One tiny tip. That's it. Game over, series extended. It's on to a do-or-die Game 7.
Dave Steckel's tip of a fluttering Brooks Laich shot on net in overtime found its way past goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury to extend the Capitals' season for at least one more game. The Caps' 5-4 OT win in Game 6 stunned a Penguins' home crowd that saw victory slip through their fingers by the slightest of margins.
The play started with a faceoff to Fleury's left. The Caps won the draw and a Penguins player broke his stick. After a brief scrum, Laich picked up the biscuit along the boards and sent a simple shot chest-high toward the net. Steckel broke free of defenseman Philippe Boucher just in time to get his stick in the air and direct it past Fleury for the goal.
The game before, Steckel couldn't score into an open net early in overtime and the Penguins won 4-3 in Washington on Evgeni Malkin's goal to force the potential closeout game on Monday.
"I told myself if I had a chance again, I wouldn't miss," Steckel said. "I was in the right place at the right time. I personally didn't know where it went or anything. ... It was the biggest goal of my career so I didn't know what to do. I just jumped around."
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Game 7 will be at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Verizon Center.
"I think it's going to be great game," Alex Ovechkin said. "I think the league wants us to play Game 7 (on Wednesday)."
The Capitals couldn’t hold a 4-3 lead late in regulation when Sidney Crosby scored. Brooks Orpik found a loose puck along the left wing boards and sent a shot toward Simeon Varlamov. Crosby, however, knocked it down, and spun toward the net and batted it past the rookie netminder to send the game to OT.
It was the third overtime game of the series, the most in any round of these NHL playoffs. Pittsburgh won the first two, both on deflections off Capitals defensemen.
Pittsburgh had won eight of its previous nine overtime games and had been 7-1 against the Capitals in OT.
Ovechkin, so dominating while scoring seven of Washington’s first 15 goals in the series, didn’t get a goal but had three assists and has 13 points in six games. Crosby has 10, including six goals.
Viktor Kozlov scored twice for the Capitals to make certain an exhausting, competitive series will go the limit. There’s been no rest for the weary, either, as Monday’s game was the fourth in six nights -- all of them tight and tense. All but one game has been decided by one goal.
Now that they’ve forced a Game 7 that didn’t look all that certain after they ceded home-ice advantage, the Capitals hope to finally close out a series against the Penguins. Four times since 1992 they’ve led the Penguins by two games in a series, including this one, but have yet to win one.
And, for the fifth time in six games, the team scoring first didn’t win.
