Welcome to Saturday, folks!
After a relatively quiet trade deadline, the Bruins are back in action today — and it’s a pretty important game in the playoff race.
Where: TD Garden – Boston, MA
How to follow: ABC, 98.5 The Sports Hub
As always, treat that 12:30 start time with an asterisk, as this is an ABC game.
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We could place bets on what time puck drop actually happens. I’m going with 12:39 PM.
Anyways, the Capitals come into today’s game four points behind the Bruins in the race for the second wild card spot, though the Bruins do have two games in hand.
The Caps made one of the deadline’s bigger moves earlier this week, dealing longtime defenseman (and Massachusetts native) John Carlson to the Anaheim Ducks.
They also sent forward Nic Dowd out to Vegas.
The Caps also made a couple of acquisitions, bringing in David Kampf and Timothy Liljegren.
These moves aren’t necessarily a waving of the white flag, but they certainly weren’t a team loading up for a playoff run (though to be fair, the Caps weren’t really positioning themselves as contenders anyways).
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The Caps are led by familiar faces: Alex Ovechkin (50PTS), Tom Wilson (49PTS), and Jakob Chychrun (49PTS).
They’ve also gotten good production out of Aliaksei Protas (20 goals) and Dylan Strome (49PTS).
On the Bruins side of things, I wouldn’t expect anything majorly different today.
David Pastrnak needs to get going, as his goal drought extends toward the “is there a bigger problem here?” territory.
Columbus is now just a point behind the Bruins, and the Blue Jackets play later on tonight, so there’s a little extra pressure in the standings now as well.
Hey, that’s what makes this a fun time of year, right?
Bruins! Capitals! On NATIONAL TELEVISION!
Discuss.