Bruins impressive in win over Capitals

With less than a week to go before the trading deadline, the Bruins are giving the message to general manager Don Sweeney that this season might be worth saving.

With perhaps their best performance of the season, the B’s defeated the Washington Capitals, 4-2, at Capital One Arena on Thursday night for their second win in a row.

And for the second straight game, rookie goalie Jeremy Swayman posted another excellent performance, and also for the second straight game, a Brad Marchand shorthanded goal stood up as the game-winner.

The B’s raced out to a 3-0 lead, but the Caps got back in the game with two second-period five-on-three goals. Craig Smith gave the B’s an insurance goal on the power play with 3:05 left in regulation when he sniped a shot past old friend Zdeno Chara and then goalie Ilya Samsonov from the bottom of the right circle.

For the second game in a row, the B’s played a strong first period and took a 2-0 lead into the second. Their lead could have been even bigger than that. They outshot the Caps 18-9 and had several glittering chances.

As good as the scoring opportunities were, their two goals were delivered from the hockey gods above.

They went up 1-0 just 33 seconds into the game when Jeremy Lauzon did what coach Bruce Cassidy has been begging his D-men to do — get their shot through the first layer of defense. Lauzon’s soft shot somehow made it through a maze of legs and sticks to Samsonov, who could not squeeze the puck and it trickled through him behind the goal line.

They’d get another one late, but not before Swayman stopped another breakaway, this time on Garnet Hathaway, knocking away the puck in tight with the knob of his stick.

Then at 16:02, Anton Blidh got a gift goal, though he’d put in the work for it. First, he forced a turnover from Alex Ovechkin in the neutral zone and got the puck deep. Nick Jensen tried to rim it around behind the net, but it hit a stanchion and bounced out to the short side. Blidh, who’d missed an open net earlier in the period, had an easy job to tuck it behind the unsuspecting Samsonov, who’d been expecting the puck to come out the other side.

Things started to get nasty at the end of the period. Nick Ritchie decided to go with Hathaway and pounded the Cap with several rights to the head before driving him to the ice. Ritchie had taken a slashing penalty but the B’s killed that off.

It would just be the start of the B’s parade to the box, and it didn’t hurt them right away.

First, with Jakub Zboril in the box for tripping, Marchand scored his 30th career shorthanded goal and second in as many games as he made a beautiful move through the slot and beat Samsonov with a backhander.

But the B’s tempted fate a few too many times. Blidh took a bad, unnecessary slashing penalty in the neutral zone on Lars Eller, then collided with the Cap, earning what looked like a very soft roughing penalty.

Then, Zboril was tagged for a questionable interference penalty, giving the Caps a lengthy five-on-three opportunity. They made the most of it, scoring a pair of two-man-up goals just 19 seconds apart.

First, Ovechkin scored on a one-timer on which Swayman had little chance four seconds after Zboril took a seat.

That only ended Blidh’s first penalty, allowing the Caps to continue on with another lengthy five-on-three. They would not need much of it. At 10:27, T.J. Oshie beat Swayman nearly from the same spot that Ovechkin scored, and all of a sudden the B’s had lost control of a game they should have had locked up.

The B’s had a chance to make the Caps pay late in the period when Carl Hagelin was called for boarding after pushing Steven Kampfer dangerously into the boards, but the power play was one part of their game that was not clicking. With that unsuccessful PP, the B’s were 0-for-3 on the night and headed into the third with a slim one-goal lead.

from Boston Herald https://ift.tt/2Rcrtmk