Preds Expose Caps, 7-2

Even before Tuesday night's 7-2 spanking at the hands of the Predators in Nashville, the Capitals looked like a team in obvious need of a break. Their top goaltender has been ailing for a few nights, their defense has been susceptible to yielding swaths of unanswered goals for a couple of weeks now, their five-on-five scoring has virtually dried up, and their special teams have been inconsistent.

"These games where everything goes wrong and everything seems to go against you," says Caps center Lars Eller. "They happen a couple of times a year. And this one was one of those were it's just a collectively off day for the whole team. We just didn't have it."
There is a break on the horizon for the Capitals - a weeklong bye week/All-Star break at the end of this month - but they're going to have to gut their way through four more games to get to it. And they're going to have to find a way to earn some points in those games, too.
In dropping six of their last nine games (3-4-2), they've used up what little standings equity they had. Tuesday's loss tumbled them out of the top spot in the Metropolitan Division - they're tied with Columbus but the Jackets hold the tie-breaker - and they are now just three points clear of fourth place in their division.
Going into Tuesday's game, the Caps were without a five-on-five goal in their previous two games, and they were facing the league's best defensive team while playing for the second time in as many nights. If that wasn't daunting enough, they started goalie Pheonix Copley on both nights; he has played every minute of the last two and a half games since No. 1 netminder Braden Holtby left Saturday's loss against Columbus midway through the second period with an eye injury. Holtby was slated to start in Nashville, but hours before game time he informed the team he wasn't fully recovered from Saturday's injury.

"That is obviously a difficult loss in a little bit of difficult circumstance," says Caps coach Todd Reirden, "finding out just a few hours before the game that Braden wasn't going to be able to play. So we have to go with Pheonix in that situation, on a back-to-back situation, which is a very difficult situation, especially coming in and playing a team that hadn't played the prior evening. So our game plan was regardless [of what happened], we had to stay with Pheonix for the evening."
But the Caps didn't help Copley out at all.
In the first, they gave up a slew of odd-man rushes, and got burned on two of them as Nashville jumped out to a 2-0 lead on goals from Viktor Arvidsson and Nick Bonino.
"We got behind the eight-ball after some poor puck management and some odd-man chances that they were able to convert on," says Reirden.
Early in the second, the Preds made it 3-0 on Arvidsson's drive-by deflection of a left point shot at 1:21. The Caps got on the board with a Nicklas Backstrom power-play goal at 7:07 of the second, and for a few minutes after that goal, the Caps played probably their best few minutes of the night. They spent some time in the offensive zone and generated some quality chances, hitting the post twice.

When the Caps went to the power play again just past the midpoint of the second, they had a chance to pull within one. That didn't happen.
Instead, the Caps coughed up the puck at the Nashville line, and Arvidsson rolled in alone and beat Copley on a shorthanded breakaway to make it 4-1 at 12:08.
An Andre Burakovsky turnover resulted in a Rocco Grimaldi goal, the latter performing a (Denis) Savardian spin-o-rama and beating Copley with a backhander to the short side to make it 5-1 at 14:57 of the second.
The Caps then suffered the indignity of a third unanswered goal with just 5.8 seconds left in the second when Bonino tipped a Mattias Ekholm shot to the back of the net.
Nashville made it four unanswered on a Calle Jarnkrok goal at 7:56 of the third, marking the fourth time in 16 days the Caps have been dented for four or more unanswered strikes in a game.
Playing in his 700th career game, T.J. Oshie added a late window dressing goal off the rush - the Caps' only five-on-five goal in their last three games - to account for the 7-2 final.

It was an ugly loss to be sure, but Reirden was typically able to point to a positive to take forth from the wreckage.
"We're down 7-1," says Reirden, "and we're out there for a minute and 45 seconds and our guys are blocking shots and paying the price in a very difficult circumstance. And I'm very, very proud of the fact that not one single guy quit or stopped playing until the end of that game. It was, like I said, a tough situation.
"That being said, we've got two days moving forward here to regroup, re-evaluate before the final four games before the break, which is a big part of our season, and areas we're going to get better. We're going to spend [Wednesday] away from the rink and then get back at it on Thursday."