SKATE SHAVINGS - News and Notes from Caps' Morning Skate 2/3

Super Sunday - Sunday's matinee match against the Boston Bruins marks the 11th straight season in which Washington has hosted a game on Super Bowl Sunday. The Caps are 17-9-2-0 all time on Super Bowl Sunday and they are 17-8-2-0 in home games on Super Sunday.

Sunday's game continues Washington's six-game homestand, its longest in 13 years. The Caps started off on the good foot with a 4-3 win over Calgary on Friday, a game that might actually serve as a bit of a springboard in facing the Bruins today. The roster construction and makeup of the Flames and Bruins are somewhat similar. Both teams have active groups of defensemen and both rely heavily on their top forward line for offensive production, the Bruins even more so than the Flames.
"I think both teams play with a lot of structure," says Caps defenseman Brooks Orpik. "Even going all the way back to the Claude Julien days, [the Bruins] really stick to their structure, even that top line. They're very consistent, which is a good thing obviously. But like I said, there are no surprises going into it. What you see is what you get with them. It's a team that is well balanced and works really hard."
Man Down -Caps center Lars Eller will miss Sunday's game because of a lower body injury sustained early in the second period of Friday's win over Calgary. On the plus side, the Caps will have captain Alex Ovechkin back in the lineup after he sat out Friday's game as punishment - league-mandated suspension - for opting out of the NHL All-Star Game.
Travis Boyd is expected to draw into the lineup in Eller's absence.
"I think it's a good opportunity for some guys," says Caps center Nic Dowd, who scored the game's first goal against the Flames. "Guys have to take advantage of this. It's next man up mentality, and everyone says that, but we have enough good players in this locker room and enough leaders that playing without guys like Ovi and Lars, we should still be able to win and guys should know that. I think we do, and I think we showed that [Friday] night."
Washington has only three players who have played in every game this season: defenseman Dmitry Orlov and forwards Brett Connolly and Jakub Vrana.

The Boxing Mirror - In the wake of Friday's losing streak-snapping 4-3 win over the Calgary Flames, Caps coach Todd Reirden noted that his team needed to be a bit better at boxing out in front of the net and blocking shots. Two of Calgary's three goals in the game came from deflections from just above the top- of the paint.
"We've got to continue to improve and get better," says Reirden. "I didn't like some of our commitment to block shots, and we've got to do a better job of boxing out. Those turn into two goals right there because of commitment there, so that's got to continue to get better and improve because those are difference makers. We were able to get away with it tonight, but that's something we've got to continue to work on."
"Yeah, that's something we talked about," says Orpik, "especially with the two goalies we have. If they can see the initial shot, most of the time they're going to stop it. So it's the second opportunities and the deflections. I think we had two of those last game - one was more of a deflection and the other one was kind of a lucky bounce - and it's something we've tried to harp on.
"Even [Saturday at practice] we were working on boxing out in a couple of different drills. There are probably a lot of areas we can improve on, but that is a definite area that needs to be addressed."
Ironically, the Caps combined to block 27 shots - a single-game high for this season - in that win over the Flames, with 15 of Washington's 18 skaters recording at least one. Still, when Calgary's Elias Lindholm deflected Johnny Gaudreau's point shot past Braden Holtby to tie Friday's game at 3-3 with less than eight minutes remaining, it erased what had been a two-goal Washington lead and put the Caps in peril of losing an eighth straight game.
Caps defenseman Michal Kempny took responsibility for the goal, lamenting the fact that he didn't adequately tie up Lindholm's stick.
"We gave up two goals like that [Friday] night," says Kempny. "It was my guy who scored the last goal. My job is to box players out and to clear the space in front of Holts. So I've got to get better with it."
It's not an easy thing to do. The modern NHL defender needs to box out and keep opposing forwards from having time and space in the most dangerous area of the ice, but he must do so without taking a penalty and without taking away his goaltender's sight lines.
"I think the biggest thing now is just how you do it," says Orpik. "Something that we try to work on is trying to box guys out from the corner, because once they get there and establish their position, you're probably getting a penalty if you try to move them. And then if you ask the goalies, it's bad enough having one guy in front of them, and then if you tie up that guy, now it's two guys in front of them. I think a lot of it is just trying to establish position and not letting guys get there initially."
And yes, the goaltenders most definitely don't want to try to be looking through or around two guys.
"It's changed," says Holtby. "It's not so much taking a guy's body away anymore; it's his stick. As long as you are seeing the play, take his stick away so he can't deflect anything, that's the biggest thing. It's on us as goalies to see around the screens - obviously sometimes you can't, it's circumstantial - but that's our job. It's the deflections and stuff that make it real tough.
"It's one of those newer skills. You used to be able to just box a guy out and not let him get to those areas, but you can't really do that anymore so you've got to find different ways."
"You've got to be hard," says Kempny. "You've got to be hard because every player in this league wants to get in front of Holts and get some screen. It's very tough for us, but you've got to deal with it. You have to be hard."

Beantown Down - Over their four and a half decades in the NHL, the Capitals have forged a 62-68-21-8 record against the Bruins. Given that Washington has won each of the last 14 meetings between the two teams, it is rather remarkable that the Caps are still well below .500 against the Bruins, whether you measure ".500" legitimately or whether you measure it in NHL fashion.
That's because it took the Caps nearly six years before they were able to beat the Bruins for the first time. When Washington joined the NHL's Original 18 in 1974-75, the Bruins were a powerhouse team that won the Stanley Cup in 1970 and 1972. The Caps didn't make the playoffs for the first time until their ninth season, and it took a good chunk of that time for Washington to finally prevail over the Bruins.
Washington went 0-21-5 against the Bruins before finally earning a 6-4 win over the Bruins on March 12, 1980 at the Capital Centre. In the first season of their NHL existence, the 8-67-5 Capitals managed to skate to a 3-3 tie with the Bruins on Jan. 7, 1975. But they lost each of their other four games against the Bruins by a combined count of 38-7, as Boston scored at least eight goals in each of those wins and hit double digits twice.
If you were to remove the first 26 games and the last 14 games of the Washington-Boston series over the years, the Caps would be going into Sunday's game with a 48-47-16-8 record against the Bruins. Aside from Washington's recent dominance and the Bruins' early supremacy over the Caps, the middle three and a half decades of results between the two teams were fairly even.
In The Nets - Holtby gets the net for Washington on Sunday against the Bruins. Holtby made his NHL debut with a relief victory over the Bruins here in Washington on Nov. 5, 2010 and he has made a habit of beating the B's since then.
In addition to helping topple the defending Stanley Cup champion Bruins in the first round of the 2012 playoffs, Holtby has rolled up a 16-2-0 career mark over Boston, with four shutouts, a 1.85 GAA and a .944 save pct. During the life of Washington's 14-game winning streak over the Bruins, Holtby is 12-0-0 with a 1.57 GAA and a .950 save pct.
For the Bruins, we're expecting to see Tuukka Rask in net. When the Caps downed the Bruins 4-2 in Boston on Jan. 10, they defeated Jaroslav Halak. Rask is coming into Sunday's game on the heels of an excellent month of January in which he recorded a 5-0-2 mark with a shutout, a 1.91 GAA and a .938 save pct.
Lifetime against the Caps, Rask has struggled. He is 1-11-5 with a shutout, a 3.30 GAA and an .883 save pct.

All Lined Up -Here's how we expect the Capitals and the Bruins to look when they meet on Sunday afternoon at Capital One Arena:
WASHINGTON
Forwards
8-Ovechkin, 19-Backstrom, 77-Oshie
13-Vrana, 92-Kuznetsov 43-Wilson
23-Jaskin, 72-Boyd, 10-Connolly
25-Smith-Pelly, 26-Dowd, 65-Burakovsky
Defensemen
9-Orlov, 74-Carlson
6-Kempny, 2-Niskanen
44-Orpik, 34-Siegenthaler
Goaltenders
70-Holtby
1-Copley
Injuries
20-Eller (lower body)
29-Djoos (lower body, AHL rehab assignment)
Scratches
18-Stephenson
22-Bowey
BOSTON
Forwards
63-Marchand, 37-Bergeron, 88-Pastrnak
22-Cehlarik, 46-Krejci, 74-DeBrusk
43-Heinen, 82-Frederic, 42-Backes
20-Nordstrom, 52-Kuraly, 14-Wagner
Defensemen
33-Chara, 73-McAvoy
47-Krug, 25-Carlo
27-Moore, 86-Miller
Goaltenders
40-Rask
41-Halak
Injuries
None
Scratches
44-Kampfer
48-Grzelcyk
55-Acciari