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Heatley helps lead Senators past Capitals

Jan 31, 2007 - 5:44 AM OTTAWA (Ticker) -- Dany Heatley helped the Ottawa Senators extend a streak to a decade.

Heatley scored the decisive goal and Jason Spezza added a tally and an assist as the Senators edged the Washington Capitals, 3-2.

Captain Daniel Alfredsson scored the initial goal of the game for Ottawa, which reached the 30-win mark for the 10th consecutive season.

"When you play your second game back-to-back, getting the lead early on always helps, so that was nice for us," Alfredsson said. "We played a really solid first period."

After Alex Ovechkin scored his NHL-leading 32nd goal of the season at the 9:04 mark of the second period to cut the lead to 2-1, Heatley tallied on the power play to help the Senators even their record to 2-2 vs. the Capitals this season.

After receiving a pass from defenseman Wade Redden, Heatley, who leads his team in goals (31) and assists (35), took several steps in and batted his own rebound off the pads of goaltender Olaf Kolzig to give Ottawa a 3-1 lead with 9:29 remaining in the second session.

"My goal was a little bit of a lucky one," Heatley said. "Spezza spread them out and allowed me room to take it to the net."

Martin Gerber stopped 35 shots for the Senators, who have won eight of their last 10 games.

"We did a really good job especially in the first two periods," Gerber said. "We kept their chances really low. At the end they got some momentum to bring everything up front and we battled with them."

"We had a lot of chances and we played really well today," Ovechkin said. "We just didn't score the goals. The Ottawa goalie played very well but we didn't score when we had chances in the second and third periods."

Donald Brashear scored his second goal of the season and Kolzig had 35 saves for Washington, which has lost two of three and six of its last eight games.

"Sometimes it's just not your night," Capitals coach Glen Hanlon said. "You can't fault anybody tonight for not trying or doing what they need to do. Likely fatigue set in on us, but throughout the course of the season these things happen."