Sharks 2, Caps 0
The Caps lost a chance to put some more room between them and the lower seeds in the Eastern Conference and even gain ground on Tampa Bay in the Southeast Division and No. 4 Pittsburgh in the conference-seeding chase. Both of those teams were also beaten on Tuesday night. Check out our game story here.
Washington goalie Michal Neuvirth was very good for 51 minutes, It was the final nine that did him in. He gave up two questionable goals to the Sharks and that was that. Of course, they wouldn’t have mattered at all if Neuvirth’s teammates had actually managed to score one themselves. But it wasn’t to be on this night. The Caps caught a bad break early when the referee waved off an obvious goal after his whistle stopped the play far too quick. They never recovered.
“It was deflating. Obviously, [the whistle] shouldn’t have blown,” said Washington coach Bruce Boudreau. “The referee came up and apologized. Doesn’t do us a lot of good. We are a team that plays a lot better with the lead these days than coming from behind. So it probably would have helped us. But you can’t blame that one chance. We didn’t get opportunities because we didn’t deserve them.”
That about sums up this one. It wasn’t a pretty game. The Sharks kept the Caps to the outside and limited their chances. That certainly looks like a team that has rounded into playoff form after a rough start to the season. There’s a reason they’ve been the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference each of the last two years.
“They didn’t give us nothing,” said Caps center Mathieu Perreault. “But we didn’t really battle to get anything, either.”
The addition of Alex Semin to the lineup after 12 games out with a groin injury really didn’t help much. Not that Washington expected Semin to produce a hat trick right out of the box. He was rusty early and looked out of gas by the third period. No doubt, it’s good to have him back anyway. And Semin did produce a game-high four shots on goal and would have been credited with the first-period goal if it had counted. San Jose goalie Antti Niemi knocked the puck in himself. Semin managed 17 minutes, 47 seconds of ice time.
“It feels like we didn’t feel the urgency tonight,” said Perreault. “There was no work ethic at all. We didn’t stick to our game plan at all and we didn’t play like the way we did the last two games. We had nothing, I felt.”
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