March 30 vs. Boston Bruins at Capital One Arena
Time: 7:00 p.m.
TV: MNMT
Stream: MonSports.net/Stream
Radio: 106.7 The Fan, Capitals Radio 24/7
Boston Bruins (42-17-15)
Washington Capitals (36-27-9)
The Caps come home to host the Boston Bruins for the first of two late-season visits to the District in 2023-24. Boston will return to Washington on April 15 to supply the opposition for the Capitals’ home ice finale of the regular season.
Saturday’s game is No. 73 on the season for the Caps, and it’s a milestone event for Washington’s venerable No. 74, defenseman John Carlson. Carlson turns the odometer over on Saturday against the B’s, playing in the 1,000th game of his NHL career exactly two weeks after teammate T.J. Oshie reached a thousand games on March 16 against the Canucks in Vancouver.
Seven weeks ago in Boston, the Caps and Bruins met for the first time this season, tangling in a matinee match at TD Garden. Behind an 18-save performance in the final game of the Caps’ Mentors’ Trip, the Caps blanked the Bruins 3-0, ending a six-game slide (0-5-1), their longest of the season.
No one knew it at the time, but it was the beginning of an impressive run that vaulted the Caps from 12th place to eighth place in the Eastern Conference standings. Beginning with that win in Boston seven Saturdays ago, Washington is 14-6-2, a pace that would produce 112 points over the course of a full 82-game schedule.
The Caps have won six of their last eight, but they’re coming off a lackluster 5-1 loss to the Leafs in Toronto on Thursday night.
“It’s going to be a big game for us,” says Caps’ defenseman Trevor van Riemsdyk of Saturday’s game. “At this time of year, you can’t really afford to lose a couple in a row. It feels like either you fall out of it, or people are catching you. So it’s important to put those games like [Thursday] night behind you as quick as you can, and learn from it what you can.
“But it’s an exciting opportunity. It’s a team we’re very familiar with, and it’ll be a fun game. Hopefully we can start on time and put together a better effort than we did [Thursday] night.”
Washington’s longest winning streak since Feb. 10 is a modest three games, achieved three times. But the best thing the Caps have done over that stretch is to limit regulation losses, and to prevent them from stacking up. Over those 22 games in the last seven weeks, Washington has dropped consecutive contests in regulation just once, and it responded by winning six of its next seven games, just ahead of Thursday’s loss.
As the Bruins come to town for the first time this season, the Caps are again looking to rebound from a loss, but it’s just one loss. With just 10 games remaining on their schedule – and with those games being played in a span of just 18 days – the Caps hold a two-point bulge over ninth-place Detroit in the battle for the final wild card berth in the Eastern Conference.
“We’ve been playing really good hockey,” says Caps’ winger Max Pacioretty. “And we know that with 21 games in 39 days or something, you’re going to have games like [Thursday] night. It’s about how quickly you can forget about it, find your confidence and move forward, because we are playing some very important hockey here coming up, and we know what’s at stake.”
One thing that held true seven weeks ago is even truer today; the Caps can ill afford a sustained losing streak. They will almost certainly need to win more than half of their remaining games to land a berth in the Stanley Cup playoffs, and their remaining schedule is liberally dotted with games against elite NHL squads – such as Boston, twice – and other teams that still harbor playoff hopes.
Washington has been good at shaking off the occasional bad beats for the last seven weeks, and it will need to muster that collective mindset again on Saturday.
“When we hit these stumbling blocks and we don’t perform at the level that we wanted to for whatever reason – opponent, circumstance, back-to-back whatever it is,” begins Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery, “we recognize that, ‘Gosh, we’ve got to do something about that, and we’ve got to change that right now, in the next game.’ And that’s what our team has done, frequently over the last couple of months.
“I always remember something from what Victor Hedman said – from Tampa Bay – and I feel like that’s exactly how the good teams [feel], and I feel like that’s what our team is going to get to. There was a stat a few years ago, where Tampa didn’t lose back-to-back games in the playoffs for 50 games or something crazy like that. And they asked Victor Hedman why, and he goes, ‘You know why? Because our group takes losing personally.’
“And to me, that is a team that is like, when we lose a game – and you’re going to lose a game; that’s part of pro sports, you’re not going to have it one night, or whatever, you get an incredible performance by a player on the other team and you lose a game. But that doesn’t sit well with your group, and you do something about it the next night. And that, to me, is a sign of a team that can really do some things.”
Saturday’s game moves the Bruins into the back half of a season-long six-game road trip. The B’s are 1-2-0 on the trip to date, and they’ve dropped three of their last four overall. Boston fell in Philly and in Tampa Bay, but it authored a 5-3 win over Florida in between those two setbacks on the journey.
Heading into Friday’s light slate of NHL activity, the Bruins are one of seven teams clustered within five points of one another at the top of the standings board among the League’s entire group of 32 teams. Boston holds a two-point advantage over Florida in the chase for the top spot in the Atlantic Division, but it trails the New York Rangers by three points in the race for the top seed on the Eastern Conference side of the playoff bracket.
