Boston Overpowers Caps, 4-1

Losing three straight games in the Stanley Cup Playoffs will either end a team's season or put it on the verge of extinction. After their 4-1 loss to the Bruins in Friday night's Game 4 of the first-round series between the two teams, the Caps find themselves on the verge of extinction, down 3-1 in the series and needing a victory in Sunday's Game 5 in Washington to keep their season alive.

Losing a playoff game will never feel good, but the Caps didn't give themselves much of a chance in a game they needed to win. They came out flat, they played flat and slow, and they stayed flat for most of the game's 60 minutes, the first game of this series that didn't require overtime.
"We were flat to start, and we got marginally better," says Caps coach Peter Laviolette. "We've got to play a lot better than that."
How were the Caps so collectively flat for so long in a game that mattered so much?
"It's just not good enough," says Caps right wing Tom Wilson. "I don't know what the reason is. Obviously at the beginning of the game, teams are feeling each other out a little bit, but we need to be the desperate team in that situation, and push the pace and take it to them. It just wasn't there."
In the first minute of Friday's game, the Caps had a chance to get a jump on the Bruins when Boston was busted for too many dudes on the ice. But although three of Washington's nine goals in this series have been scored with the extra man, the eye test tells a different story with the Capitals' extra-man unit. They're predictable, stagnant and lackluster, a damning combination at point of the calendar, let alone in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.
Throughout this series, momentum has shifted from period to period, but the Caps seemed to spend virtually all of Friday's game chasing the momentum train, in vain. Although they were thoroughly outplayed in the first period, Caps goaltender Ilya Samsonov was on his game. He blanked the B's in the game's first 20 minutes, giving his teammates a chance to regroup and come out stronger in the middle 20 minutes.

But the Caps never could get on track. Boston played fast all night while Washington was rarely able to generate any consistent northerly movement with the puck. Over a span of 18 minutes and 40 seconds of a game they needed to win - from midway through the first to nearly midway through the second - they failed to register a shot on net.
When Nic Dowd broke that drought by putting a puck on Boston goalie Tuukka Rask in the eighth minute of the second period, it was just the Caps' third shot on net of the night at 5-on-5, with all three of them coming from bottom six forwards. Washington's first shot on net from a top six forward at 5-on-5 came from Alex Ovechkin, a 47-footer at 13:32 of the second period.
By then, the Caps were down a goal. Dmitry Orlov was assessed a major penalty for an open ice hit on Boston blueliner Kevan Miller just seconds after Dowd broke the shot dry spell. And although further video review lightened Orlov's sentence to a double minor, Boston jumped out to a 1-0 lead on the ensuing power play when Brad Marchand scored at 8:00 of the second to stake the Bruins to a lead.
Marchand's goal was the seventh straight Boston goal from one of the Bruins' top six forwards.
Once again, despite a dismal second period, Samsonov kept the Caps close. Boston took a 1-0 lead to the third, the first time this series that the Bruins have owned a lead at any intermission.
The Bruins opened the third period with 1:45 worth of carryover power play time, and when David Pastrnak scored his first goal of the series with the extra man just 29 seconds into the third, Boston went up 2-0, the first multi-goal lead for either team in the series.
Thirty-four seconds later, the lead was 3-0. Jake Debrusk missed the net on a breakaway, but Boston got a membership bounce off the glass, right to the late-arriving Charlie Coyle, who backhanded it home at 1:03.
Washington had three power play chances in the third, and it finally broke through on the second of those at 4:54 of the third. Ovechkin's one-timer from his office shattered his stick and bounded into the net off a Boston defender's skate to make it a 3-1 game.
That was as close as the Caps got. Boston's Matt Grzelcyk closed out the scoring with the Bruins' third power-play goal of the game at 14:50, a one-timer from the right circle.
"All facets solid," says Boston coach Bruce Cassidy of his team's effort and performance in Game 4. "Obviously, special teams speak for themselves. We gave up a goal there on a late power play that went in off our guy, so structure was excellent. We had some big blocks on Ovechkin. We kept some pucks out of the bumper with pressure, appropriate pressure.
"On our power play, we made a few adjustments and tonight they paid off. We got some shots we wanted. At 5-on-5, boy we didn't give up much. We protected the neutral zone well against a good transition team."
Suddenly staring at the possibility of a third straight first-round exit, the Caps have no more margin for error.

"Tough situation, tough spot," says Caps center Nicklas Backstrom of his team's current predicament. "But something that we've been through before; I feel like we've been down like this before. We've just got to take it one shift at a time, one game at a time - that kind of scenario - from now on.
"It's a tough situation, but we've got to believe in the locker room. We need to regroup here and go from there."
Game 5 is Sunday night in Washington.
"The thing about every game is, it's one page in the story," says Laviolette. "And you've got to turn the page and move on to the next one. We've just got to go home and get one [win]."