Washington entered its Wednesday-night meeting with St. Louis riding a skid of four straight defeats. Across those games the club had managed a mere five goals, while Alex Ovechkin, the captain, went without registering even one point.
All that misfortune turned around versus the Blues, though. And one individual appears to deserve more credit than the rest for snapping the funk and igniting the 6-1 result: Nastya Ovechkina.
Ahead of the most one-sided triumph the team has notched this young season, the captain's wife cooked up borscht — that sour, beet-driven soup — for everyone on the roster.
Sharing a message on Instagram after the final buzzer, Ovechkina cracked that whipping up the dish for the squad before every game might have to turn into a requirement.
Powered by the East European staple, the club poured in its biggest goal output in any single game so far this year, and the captain reached a marker he'd long been pursuing. Ovechkin etched his name in the record books as the league's first-ever skater to amass 900 goals over a career, tucking home on his backhand a loose rebound off Jakob Chychrun past St. Louis netminder Jordan Binnington only 2:39 deep into the second period.
Alongside her boys, Sergei and Ilya, Ovechkina took it in from Capital One Arena as her husband celebrated the towering feat.
That 6-1 blowout also saw a pair of goals from Anthony Beauvillier, who skates on Ovechkin's line, plus three combined from veteran mainstays John Carlson and Tom Wilson. The outcome pulled Washington off a share of last place in the East and returned them to a playoff berth.
It marked hardly the first easy victory apparently fueled by her cooking. Way back in the 2020-21 campaign she made the dish for the full squad, and the next contest produced Washington's most prolific scoring night of that year — an 8-1 demolition of Boston.
The Caps buried the Bruins that evening with half a dozen consecutive tallies over the opening two periods. At no other point across that 2020-21 schedule did the team manage more than half a dozen tallies in one outing.
Talking over the summer just past, Ovechkina noted that Sasha now and then requests she prepare the dish for his teammates. She recounted simmering massive pots of it some years ago, after which the squad triumphed by roughly 8-1 — a margin she called staggering regardless. The players ribbed her that the result was her doing, she said, and since that day the occasional request keeps surfacing.
Once Wednesday wrapped up, the Capitals barely had a moment to savor it, traveling immediately to Pittsburgh for a Thursday meeting against the Penguins to close out consecutive nights.
Here's hoping the captain and his teammates carried some of Nastya's soup along — and kept it well away from Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin.