The Rangers and Capitals combined for 72 penalty minutes in the first 4 minutes, 14 seconds of their game Wednesday night, their first meeting since Washington forward Tom Wilson injured New York star Artemi Panarin earlier this week in the same building.
There were six separate fights to start the game at Madison Square Garden, including a line brawl one second after the opening faceoff. The Capitals defeated the Rangers 4-2 in a game that ended up with 141 penalty minutes.
Both teams put out forwards from their bottom six to open the game. For the Capitals, it was Nic Dowd, Carl Hagelin and Garnet Hathaway fighting the Rangers’ Kevin Rooney, Colin Blackwell and Phillip Di Giuseppe, respectively.
Rangers defenseman Brendan Smith then fought Wilson on his first shift, 50 seconds into the game. Smith was given an instigator minor penalty and a 10-minute misconduct. The Capitals announced during the second period that Wilson would not return with an upper-body injury.
“You guys watched what happened the game before. I really don’t want to touch on it too much. It’s been exhausted already,” Smith said. “I thought that it should have been handled before this game, and it wasn’t, so unfortunately it had to be on my shoulders, and I took it.”
There were two more fights at 4:14 of the first period, with the Capitals’ Lars Eller taking on Strome and Michael Raffl fighting the Rangers’ Anthony Bitetto.
The first period ended with the teams combining for 100 penalty minutes. There was no score after one.