Caps Bow Out with 3-1 Game 5 Loss

Less than a week ago, the Caps were less than three minutes away from taking a 2-0 series lead over the Boston Bruins. On Sunday night in the District, the Caps quietly exited the 2021 Stanley Cup Playoff tournament, losing their fourth straight game, 3-1 in Game 5 of their best-of-seven set with the Bruins.

Washington couldn't close out that third-period lead in Game 2 and couldn't seal another one-goal lead in the final frame of Game 3 in Boston, either. They lost both games in overtime, and when they played poorly in a Game 4 loss on Friday in Beantown, they left themselves with no more rope with which to work.
Needing a win to stay alive in Sunday's Game 5, the Caps were better but not good enough. They fell down 2-0 in the second period and couldn't quite claw their way back. Boston moves on to face the winner of the Pittsburgh-New York Islanders series.
"I don't think we had our legs as much as we did at home," says Boston coach Bruce Cassidy. "But we kept them to the outside, we didn't beat ourselves in terms of mismanaging pucks through the neutral zone and giving them odd-man rushes.
"I thought [the Caps] were good on the walls to keep pucks alive in the [offensive] zone - that's where we could have been better, getting some of those pucks off the wall and getting out of our zone. So it was very taxing on our [defense], but the one thing we did well was keep them to the outside."
For the third straight game, Washington had some early power play opportunities with which to take an early lead, but it failed to do so. Three first-period man advantage opportunities - the third one a carryover into the early seconds of the middle period - came and went without much in the way. The Caps also had 23 seconds worth of a 4-on-3 power play in the first.
Entries were inconsistent, zone time was scarce, and the percentage of zone time in which the Caps were set up and able to work was even smaller. Washington managed four shots on net in those six minutes of power play time when the score was still 0-0, and less than a minute after the third of those man advantages expired, Boston took a lead it would not relinquish.
Washington tried to exit its end with a hard reverse around the wall, but Boston blueliner Mike Reilly kept it in at the left point and dished to David Pastrnak high in the zone. When Pastrnak took control of the puck, the Caps outnumbered Boston four skaters to three below the puck, but none of them touched the talented Bruins winger as he went through his legs with the puck to shimmy down to the bottom of the left circle before cutting straight to the cage and beating Ilya Samsonov for a 1-0 Bruins lead at 2:28 of the second.
Held to just 20 shots in a dismal Game 4 showing, the Caps reached that number before the midpoint of the second period of Sunday's Game 5. But too many of those shots hit Boston netminder Tuukka Rask squarely in the spoked-B crest on his sweater; there were few second chances to be had and the Bruins were giving up virtually nothing off the rush, as was the case throughout most of the series.
Washington scored only 10 goals in the five-game series, but it had some success with tips and deflections early on in the set. When it was able to get sticks on those type of attempts in Sunday's game, the shots went wide or fell at the feet of Bruins defenders who were ready and able to get it out of harm's way.
Late in the second, Boston doubled the deficit the Caps were facing.
A Caps clearing bid banked off a linesman in neutral ice and came to Pastrnak just outside the Washington line. Pastrnak collided with Nicklas Backstrom and lost his footing, but Reilly was there to support, sending Patrice Bergeron into the Caps' zone, squarely in the middle of the ice. As four red sweaters closed on him, Bergeron let go of a shot from above the circles, and it beat Samsonov on the low blocker side, a dagger of a goal to give up at that juncture of the contest.
The Caps showed some life early in the third when Conor Sheary scored on one of the rare second chances available to Washington on this night; Sheary potted his own rebound just 11 seconds into the third, making it a 2-1 game with plenty of time remaining.
Washington couldn't manage the equalizer, and when Bergeron scored an unassisted goal off a turnover with 7:35 left, the Caps' task became all the more daunting.
With a late power play opportunity, the Caps appeared to pull within a goal when Lars Eller scored from a tight angle with 5:37 remaining, but officials ruled that Caps center Evgeny Kuznetsov had interfered with Rask, washing the goal away and essentially quelling the Caps' comeback bid.
As tight as the series was early, Boston scored nine of the last 11 goals of the series. After surrendering a third-period lead late in Game 3, the Caps never led at any point of the series thereafter.
"The first three games were tight games," says Caps coach Peter Laviolette. "They could have [gone] either way. In hindsight, we're not going to like the way we played the fourth game.
"Tonight our guys tried, they competed. We worked to play tight defensively, we worked to create, and the effort was there. Game 4 I think is one that we'll look back on and be disappointed about. But the first three games were a flip of the coin, and tonight we couldn't get it done."