Gritty Bradley Helps Keep Caps Alive

If you were looking for a more unlikely hero to step and save the season for the Washington Capitals, you'd have a tough time finding a better choice than right winger Matt Bradley. A plugger with a lot of heart who commands respect inside the Washington locker room for his work ethic, Bradley has never scored more than nine goals in a full season and only had five all season long.

But that didn't matter earlier this evening. With his team down three games to one to the New York Rangers and the season on the brink, Bradley scored a pair of first period goals that were all Washington needed on its way to a 4-0 win over the Rangers to force a Game Six on Sunday back in New York.

---

---

While Bradley wasn't the only hero -- rookie goalie Simeon Varlamov recorded his second shutout of the series, and Alex Ovechkin added another incredible goal to his career highlight reel -- the news as the game opened was Rangers head coach John Tortorella's decision to make winger Sean Avery a healthy scratch, a decision that was greeted with unrestrained glee by the local fans.

Nobody missed him. Bradley's goals came seven minutes apart in the first period. The first tally came at 4:58 with Capitals defenseman Brian Pothier in the box, when Boyd Gordon lobbed a clearing attempt up ice that somehow found its way onto Bradley's stick. Streaking in on Lundqvist all alone, Bradley nearly lost the handle on the puck, but retained control and used a backhand to beat the Rangers goalie for the 1-0 lead.

Bradley's second goal came at 12:07 with the winger lugging the puck deep in the New York zone along the right wing boards. Just before the puck was about to cross the goal line, Bradley loosed a bad angle wrist shot on net as Lundqvist hugged the post. But the puck took a bad hop and somehow found its way into the net through his five hole to stretch the lead to 2-0. "I'm not going to lie. I was just throwing it at the net and luckily it went in. You don't get many against a great goalie like that," Bradley said after the game.

As for Lundqvist, he was as surprised as anyone that the puck found the back of the net. "I made a bad decision and tried to stand and cover the five hole but my pads are not built like that to cover that well, so I have to go down on one knee, but I didn't. I thought it would be good enough to stand up like that but it went through."

The second period provided more of the same as Washington dominated the run of play. At 4:57 of the period, Nicklas Backtrom won a faceoff back to Alexander Semin, who promptly launched a wrist shot on net that beat Lundqvist to the opposite post. But the highlight of the period came at 19:31, when Alex Ovechkin reminded everyone why he's the league's reigning MVP as he beat three Rangers on his way to scoring his second goal of the series.

Skating with the puck just inside the blue line along the left wing boards, Ovechkin treated Rangers center Chris Drury like a pylon on an autocross course; then he nutmegged defenseman Derek Morris; and followed it up with a backhand that beat Lundqvist while Aaron Voros was draped around his neck: 4-0 Washington.



The resulting eruption from the crowd was so loud and that it carried through the next faceoff drowning out the horn at the end of the period. Unable to hear the horn, both teams kept playing after the end of the period and had to be separated by the officials.

At that point the game was effectively over, as Tortorella lifted Lundqvist before the start of the third period in favor of Steven Valiquette, while Caps head coach Bruce Boudreau removed both Ovechkin and defenseman Mike Green well before the end of the period. But if you turned the game off there, you missed plenty of fireworks, as the Rangers did their best to keep things chippy on the ice, with Colton Orr and Drury both earning 10-minute misconduct penalties.

But the biggest news of the period came when a Caps fan sitting behind the New York bench doused Tortorella with a beer through an opening in the glass. A water bottle soon flew in the other direction in response, and before you knew it, assistant head coach Jim Schoenfeld was the only person standing between Tortorella and a climb over the glass.



After the game, Tortorella refused to discuss the incident, while the Ranger PR rep standing over his shoulder threatend to end the press conference if any of the assembled reporters insisted on pressing the issue.



With the nonsense over with, the attention now turns back to Game Six on Sunday. So who's under more pressure to win? If you're Capitals head coach Bruce Boudreau, it's Washington, a team with another game to win just to survive, a contention that Rangers defenseman Marc Staal had to agree with. "We love playing at [Madison Square Garden] in front of our fans and we'll be ready to fo. We're confident to play our best game and try to close it out there ... We obviously don't want to come back here."