After losing on opening night to the Montreal Canadiens, the Toronto Maple Leafs redeemed themselves with a 3-2 win over the Washington Capitals on Thursday.
The loss was the second straight for the Caps to open their season.
The Leafs trailed 1-2 after the first period.
Ilya Samsonov made 24 saves in the Maple Leafs win.
“A lot of emotion, you know, in the first period,” Samsonov said. “First game with the Leafs for me and with my old team, but you know I’m enjoying it. We get some smiles right now. We win an important game for us. Everything is good.
“It was unbelievable, the fans were so loud. Unbelievable, I really enjoyed playing here.”
John Tavares started the scoring with his first goal of the season and a 1-0 lead for Toronto.
Tavares’ goal came off the power play.
“We played with more purpose tonight,” Toronto coach Sheldon Keefe said. “It was a tough game, a hard game, ultimately could have gone either way, but I liked how our guys stuck with it, got the goal we needed in the third period, and did a good job after that. Even with the penalty kills late, we did a good job.”
The Capitals responded with goals from Nic Dowd and Marcus Johansson.
“We’re doing enough not to win, we’ve got to clean that up just a little bit,” Washington coach Peter Laviolette said. “The more you can remove that is wrong with the game, the mistakes you make, the more you can clean it up, the better chance you have at being successful. And to boot, we are not getting the run support to cover something like that. If you make a mistake but you score five goals, you talk about the mistake inside of a win.”
Toronto tied the game early in the middle frame when Calle Jarnkrok snapped home a goal for a 2-2 tie.
“After the second goal, a little bit of a wake-up call for me,” Samsonov said. “I needed to do [something] a little bit different. [I was] a little bit nervous. It’s hard when you get nervous, your reaction is slow, you’re moving bad, but after this, I played better and we got unbelievable work [done] today.”
Auston Matthews hot for the game-winner in the third period.
“Definitely, it was the effort we wanted tonight, and it was just a nice bounce-back game after [losing to the Montreal Canadiens] last night,” Matthews said. “I thought we played really hard, they played [hard] on their end as well. It wasn’t an easy game. It took a full 60-minute effort there from everybody.”
The Maple Leafs scored once off the power play in three chances; the Caps were scoreless in five chances.
Charlie Lindgren made 36 saves in the Washington loss.
“As a goalie, you definitely like feeling the puck,” Lindgren said. “They threw everything but the kitchen sink in that first period. They came out flying. They’ve got a great crowd here and I think they probably fed off that. They’re a really talented team. I knew they were going to get their chances and I thought our guys did a really good job tonight staying in the fight and giving us a chance to win.”
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