CALGARY Womens Corey Perry Jersey , Alberta (AP) — Pheonix Copley went the distance for his first NHL win.The Capitals‘ backup goaltender stopped 27 of 30 shots in regulation and overtime, plus three of four in the shootout, as Washington beat the Calgary Flames 4-3 on Saturday.The 26-year-old backup from North Pole, Alaska, a community near Fairbanks, was making his third career start and his fifth NHL appearance Saturday.“I’ll remember this one for a while,” said Copley, who was mobbed by his teammates after Nicklas Backstrom scored the shootout winner.“Obviously the first win means a lot, so it feels good. It wasn’t an easy game. They came back and it was good everyone kept battling.”Matt Niskanen, Jakub Vrana and T.J. Oshie scored in regulation for Washington, which has won two of three on its Canadian trip.Matthew Tkachuk, Travis Hamonic and Elias Lindholm had goals in regulation for Calgary, which lost its third straight. Johnny Gaudreau had two assists to reach 200 for his career.Sean Monahan scored for the Flames in the shootout. Mike Smith turned away 24 of 27 shots in regulation and overtime.Smith repelled T.J. Oshie and John Carlson in the shootout Kyle Brodziak Jersey Womens , while Copley held off Tkachuk, James Neal and Gaudreau.The Flames trailed 2-0 early in the first period and 3-2 late in the third. Coach Bill Peters liked his team’s recovery from a 9-1 drubbing at the hands of the Pittsburgh Penguins two days earlier.“That’s probably as hard as we’ve worked from start to finish as a group,” Peters said.“We didn’t get down. The bench was real good. Lively and vibrant. Lots of positives, but we would have liked to get the extra point.”With Smith pulled for an extra attacker, Tkachuk tipped in a shot by Rasmus Andersson with 1:27 remaining to pull the Flames even.“Obviously you don’t want to let something like that affect you,” Copley said. “There’s still a lot of hockey left and big moments in the game.”Calgary had a power play 15 seconds later when Kuznetsov put the puck over the glass for a delay-of-game penalty, but the hosts couldn’t generate the winner.Copley hoisted the Stanley Cup with the Capitals last spring when he was called up from the AHL for the postseason, even though he didn’t’ appear in any playoff games.Braden Holtby will get the majority of the starts for the Caps this season, but Copley had some prep for Saturday. He played in a shootout loss to Florida on Oct. 19 when he relieved Holtby after the first period.“Cops made some great saves back there,” Backstrom said Saturday. “It was nice to get this one for him and get this one off his back.”The Caps went ahead 3-2 with about three minutes left in the second period when Niskanen threaded a shot through traffic to beat Smith glove side.Vrana opened the scoring midway through the first period. Kuznetsov turned a turnover into a two-man rush and dished to Vrana, who beat Smith stick side.The league’s best power play struck at 14:27 when Oshie backhanded a rebound over Smith after Ovechkin’s wrist shot.Fifteen second later, Gaudreau’s shot deflected off the leg of Hamonic for the defenseman’s first goal of the season. Hamonic missed eight games with a broken jaw suffered in the season opener.The Flames drew even on Lindholm’s power-play goal with just over three minutes left in the first. The Swede one-timed a cross-ice pass from Gaudreau for his seventh goal this season.NOTES: Flames forward James Neal was hit hard into the boards in the first period. He skated to the bench favoring his left shoulder, but continued to play.UP NEXTCapitals: Get four days off before continuing their Canadian trip at Montreal on Thursday.Flames: At Toronto on Monday in the first of back-to-back road games. Dan Bouchard can appreciate Jakob Silfverberg Jersey , better than most, the Miracle in the Desert.He was a goalie for the expansion Atlanta Flames back in the 1970s, so he knows how difficult it is to build a competitive team from scratch.”It’s astonishing what they’ve done in Vegas,” said Bouchard, who still lives in the Atlanta area, when reached by phone this week. ”I think it’s the greatest thing to happen to hockey since the Miracle on Ice,” he added, referring to the seminal U.S. upset of the mighty Soviet Union at the 1980 Olympics. ”It’s that good.”Indeed, Vegas has set a new norm for expansion teams in all sports. No longer will it be acceptable to enter a league with a squad full of dregs and take your lumps for a few years, all while fans willingly pay big-league prices to watch an inferior product.The Golden Knights have come up with a stunning new template for how this expansion thing can be done.They romped to the Pacific Division title with 51 wins. In the opening round of the playoffs, they finished off the Los Angeles Kings in four straight games , casting aside a franchise that has a pair of Stanley Cup titles this decade while becoming the first expansion team in NHL history to sweep a postseason series in its debut year.Imagine how storied franchises in Montreal and Detroit and Edmonton must be feeling right about now.They didn’t even make the playoffs.From Bouchard’s perspective, it’s all good. Vegas’ success right out of the starting gate will make everyone raise their game in the years to come.”This will wake up the teams that are sitting on $90 million budgets and not doing anything http://www.officialducks.com/authentic-adidas-john-gibson-jersey ,” he said. ”People will say, `If Vegas can do it, we can do it.’ That’s a paradigm shift in the game.”When one considers how NHL expansion teams have fared over the years, the Vegas story becomes even more compelling.The Golden Knights are the first new team in the NHL’s modern era to have a winning record in their inaugural season, a period that began in 1967 and encompasses 26 new franchises (including one, the ill-fated California Seals, who are no longer around).Only six other first-year teams have made the playoffs – and that includes four that were assured of postseason berths in the landmark 1967 expansion. You see, when the NHL finally broke out of its Original Six format, doubling in size to a dozen teams, it placed all the new franchises in the same division, with the top four getting postseason berths even with sub-.500 records.Until the Golden Knights came along, the Florida Panthers were the gold standard for NHL expansion. They finished one game below .500 in their first season (1993-94) and missed the playoffs by a single point. In Year 3, they had their first winning record and made it all the way to the Stanley Cup final Authentic Josh Manson Jersey , though they were swept by the Colorado Avalanche.That remains the closest the Panthers have come to winning a title.In Sin City, the wait for a championship figures to be much shorter. Heck, the Golden Knights might do it this year.They’re 12 wins away from hoisting the Stanley Cup in a city that has always had a soft spot for long shots.”We’re still a few wins away from this being a great story,” said goalie Marc-Andre Fleury, a key contributor to the Golden Knights success.Even now, it seems like a bit of dream to coach Gerard Gallant, who thankfully will be remembered for something other than getting left at the curb to hail his own cab after being fired by the Panthers.”When this all started in October, we just wanted to compete,” Gallant said. ”Now we’re going to the second round of the playoffs. It’s unreal.”For sure, the Golden Knights wound up with a much more talented roster than most expansion teams – partly through astute planning, partly through getting access to better players as a reward for doling out a staggering $500 million expansion fee, which was a more than six-fold increase over the $80 million required of Minnesota and Columbus to enter the league in 2000.The expansion draft netted a top-line goalie in Fleury, who helped Pittsburgh win three Stanley Cups; center Jonathan Marchessault Ondrej Kase Jersey , a 30-goal scorer in Florida who was surprisingly left exposed by the Panthers; and winger James Neal, who had scored more than 20 goals in all nine of his NHL seasons. It also provided a solid group of defensemen: Colin Miller, Nate Schmidt, Deryk Engelland and Brayden McNabb.In addition, the Golden Knights wisely nabbed young Swedish center William Karlsson, who hadn’t done much in Columbus but became Vegas’ leading scorer with 43 goals and 35 assists.”They’ve got some top centers. They’ve got some real good defense. They’ve got good goaltending,” Bouchard observed. ”They went right down the middle. That’s how the built it. Then they complemented it with the fastest guys they could get their hands on. They went for speed.”Previous expansion teams didn’t have it nearly as good.Bouchard actually played on one of the better first-year teams when the Flames entered the league in 1972. They were in playoff contention much of the season and finished with more points than four other teams in the 16-team league, including the storied Toronto Maple Leafs.But that was a team that had to struggle for every win. The Flames had only three 20-goal scorers and were largely carried by their two young goalies, Bouchard and Phil Myre.”We didn’t have a bona fide 30-goal scorer,” Bouchard recalled. ”We had a lot of muckers.”That was then.The Golden Knights have shown how it should be done.If expansion teams are going to fork over enormous fees for the chance to play, they should have access to a much better pool of potential players.They should have a chance to win right away.That way, everyone wins.—Paul Newberry is a sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at pnewberry(at)ap.org or at www.twitter.com/pnewberry1963 . His work can be found at https://apnews.com/search/paul newberry—AP Sports Writer Beth Harris in Los Angeles contributed to this column.—