On Wednesday, Tampa Bay completed a surprising sweep of Washington, the top-seeded team in the Eastern Conference; Boston crushed Philadelphia here to take a three-games-to-none lead; and San Jose won in overtime and now holds a 3-0 advantage against Detroit.
Only in the Vancouver-Nashville series, which the Canucks lead by 3-1 after winning Game 4, 4-2, on Thursday in Nashville, has each team in a conference semifinal won at least one game.
This is in contrast to the opening round, whose eight matchups featured four series that went to Game 7 and two that went to Game 6.
Though most of the first-round losers packed up for the summer with heads held high — even the Rangers, dispatched in five games by Washington, seemed optimistic about next season — the emphatic nature of the results of the second-round series have exposed weaknesses not fully evident earlier.
Exhibit A is the Capitals, now ousted two years in a row after winning the conference’s regular-season title. In four years under Coach Bruce Boudreau, the Capitals have won two playoff series (both against the Rangers) and lost four.
The first three series defeats came in Game 7s, but this year’s sweep is seen as embarrassing.
“I am so sorry we let you all down,” the Washington owner, Ted Leonsis, wrote on his blog Thursday morning.
The post was titled “Congratulations to Tampa Bay” and in it Leonsis acknowledged that the Lightning was “clearly the better team” and lamented that the Capitals “weren’t resilient.”
“Even their role players outplayed our highest-paid players,” Leonsis wrote, a reference not to Alex Ovechkin, who scored two goals, had two assists and logged an even plus/minus mark, but rather to Alexander Semin, the shy and mercurial wingman.
Semin scored one goal and had an assist against Tampa Bay, going minus-2. Among his sins in the Lightning series was jumping over the boards at the wrong moment in a scoreless first period of Game 3, causing a too-many-men-on-the-ice penalty that wiped out a Washington goal. The Capitals went on to lose, 4-3.
Many fans in Washington want to see Semin traded. Many want Boudreau fired, despite his likeability, because they see him as unable to master the intricacies of defensive hockey. In the regular season, Boudreau successfully switched the Capitals’ focus from scoring goals to preventing them, and the team allowed only 197 goals after giving up 233 in 2009-10.
But against Tampa Bay’s high-powered attack, the Capitals conceded 16 goals in four games.
On the eve of Game 4, Boudreau was asked about his job security. “What, is your job on the line? Well then, I don’t know how to answer that,” he said. “Stupid question. Stupid.”
Leonsis said in his blog post that he would not act in haste.
He wrote, “The best course of action for us though is to let a few days pass; be very analytic about what needs to be improved; articulate that plan; and then execute upon it.”
Such concerns did not arise for one first-round losing coach, Lindy Ruff of Buffalo, who received a contract extension. Another coach, John Tortorella of the Rangers, received a contract extension during the regular season, when the Rangers were struggling to nail down the final playoff spot in the East.
For the Flyers, Coach Peter Laviolette’s job seemed secure, but win or lose, General Manager Paul Holmgren will probably try to acquire a dependable veteran goalie to replace Brian Boucher and Michael Leighton, who have stumbled through the postseason. Last year the two played well through three rounds before Leighton fell apart in the Stanley Cup finals against the Blackhawks.
The rookie Sergei Bobrovsky has also had trouble this spring, and Laviolette’s confusion over which goalie to start and when to remove them has not helped. In 10 playoff games, the Flyers’ starter has not finished six times.
“It’s not easy for a goalie to come in, but I don’t know who is playing tomorrow,” defenseman Kimmo Timonen said Thursday, a sentiment expressed by several Flyers.
Bobrovsky, a 22-year-old Russian who won 28 of his 54 games this season, was expected to start in Game 4.
It is hard to see what the fallout might be if the Red Wings are eliminated promptly, though losing three games by one goal, including one in overtime, indicates that they have not been badly outplayed. Still, the Sharks have beaten the Red Wings in seven of their last eight playoff games — in each case by a single goal.
One consequence of their failure could be the departure of Mike Modano, a 21-year veteran who has been a healthy scratch throughout the series after playing in only one game in the Red Wings’ first-round series against Phoenix.
Of course, there still could be Game 7s in this round. The Flyers could come back from three games down to beat the Bruins, as they did last year. But to do so, they will have to get their goaltending in order, solve Boston goalie Tim Thomas, improve their face-off performance (they won only 12 of 55 in Game 3) and perhaps assign someone to shadow the Bruins’ David Krejci, who has four goals in three games this series.
If the Flyers are unable to salvage something out of this series by winning at least a game before bowing out, they too will face the consequences of a comprehensive second-round defeat.
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