Caps' Winning Run Ends in Boston

Washington's perfect road trip hit a speed bump in Boston on Friday night as the Caps' four-game winning streak came to a halt in a 5-1 loss to the Bruins.

The lone silver lining for the Capitals was Nicklas Backstrom recording the 700th assist of his NHL career on Washington's only goal of the night, a Jakub Vrana tally in the back half of the third period.
"There's no easy games out there," says Backstrom. "I feel like Boston played well today; they were faster than us and they were forechecking a lot better. I feel like we were struggling with a lot of things."
The first frame was physical, as expected, but it was also a bit more wide-open than Wednesday's contest. Washington had a slight territorial advantage and its first period was easily its best on this night.

Boston got on the board first in the opening period, scoring on an offensive zone shift at 14:21. From the goal line on the left side of the Washington cage, Boston's Patrice Bergeron fought off a Justin Schultz check and threw a one-handed feed to the slot for Brad Marchand. Marchand went bar down with a backhander to lift the B's to the lead they would maintain the rest of the way.
Late in the first, Bruins defenseman Brandon Carlo had to be helped off the ice after taking a hit up high from the Caps' Tom Wilson in the left-wing corner of the Boston end of the ice.
"I saw the hit," says Caps coach Peter Laviolette. "[Wilson's] feet were on the ice; he stayed down with everything. It just looked like a hard hit in the corner. I'm not exactly sure what happened, but to me it looked like just a hit."
Early in the second, Wilson and Boston's Jarred Tinordi dropped the mitts, a bad trade-off for the Capitals. Those two ended up sitting in the penalty box for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, and while they were parked the score and the complexion of the game changed drastically.
Boston struck for three goals in a span of 8 minutes and 15 seconds, chasing Caps' starter Vitek Vanecek to the bench and opening up a 4-0 lead on Washington in the middle period, the largest deficit the Capitals have faced in any of their 23 games this season.
A mere 31 seconds after the fight, Boston doubled its lead when Charlie McAvoy found Trent Frederic open at the back door and hit him for a lay-up at 6:43.
Before the period was halfway over, the Bruins' Perfection Line tacked on another tally, making it a 3-0 game at 9:01 of the second. The League's most lethal trio worked a tight tic-tac-toe play down low, with Bergeron finishing from the slot.
When Marchand scored on another back-door tap-in at 14:58, Vanecek yielded the crease to Ilya Samsonov, and Wilson and Tinordi were finally released from the box.
Early in the third, Boston finished its scoring for the night when Nick Ritchie scored on a one-timer from the weak side, converting a David Krejci cross-ice feed at 1:05 of the final frame.
With 6:24 left in the third period, Backstrom and T.J. Oshie combined to win a puck battle in the right-wing corner of the Boston zone. Backstrom jimmied the puck off the wall to Vrana, who spoiled Jaroslav Halak's shutout bid with a far side dart from the right dot.

Washington entered Friday's game on a 7-1-1 roll, a span in which it surrendered a total of only 19 goals in those nine games. The Caps limited foes to a League-low average of just 25.4 shots on net per night during that span, and they held the B's to 25 shots on net in Friday's game. But it was the quality of those chances that enabled the Bruins to score five times.
"There wasn't a lot, period," says Laviolette. "But the ones that we gave up were too big, and so we'll go back, and we'll fix them. Some of them stem from the offensive zone, and definitely some of them stem from the defensive zone. I think those are the easy things to fix for me."