FanHouse BrendanBell

Capitals 3, Panthers 0: After getting blown out on Monday, the Washington Capitals rebounded on Tuesday by picking up a 3-0 win in Florida. Jose Theodore, coming off a disastrous performance in Atlanta, stopped all 19 shots he faced to earn his second shutout of the season. Viktor Kozlov, Brooks Laich and Mike Green all scored for the Capitals, while Alex Ovechkin picked up an assist, as he's still looking for goal No. 50 on the season.

For the Panthers, it's a costly loss as a win would have put them back into the top eight in the Eastern Conference. They're certainly picking a bad time to hit a slump, as the Panthers have dropped four in a row and five of their past six.

The Penguins and Hurricanes entered Tuesday's game in Pittsburgh separated by one point in the Eastern Conference standings, and when you consider the two teams occupied the No's. 9 and 10 seeds respectively, with an opportunity to jump into the No. 8 seed closing out the first half the season, well, it was a pretty big game. Cam Ward rose to the occasion for the Hurricanes, stopping 32-of-33 shots, leading them to a 2-1 win.

Ward was fantastic most of the night, but saved his best play for the final five minutes of regulation when the Penguins were on a four-minute power play. Over the past two nights, the 24-year-old netminder has stopped 66-of-67 shots.

The Florida Panthers scored three third period goals, including a game-tying score from Radek Dvorak with 1:38 to play, to force overtime at the Bell Centre in Montreal on Sunday afternoon. Defenseman Andrei Markov, one of four Montreal players voted to start in the All-Star game, scored the lone goal in a shootout helping lead the Canadiens to a 6-5 win.

The Panthers jumped out to a 2-0 lead in the first period thanks to goals from Brett McLean and David Booth, only to have Montreal come out in the second period and take over the game, scoring four goals -- including a pair in the first two minutes of the period -- while outshooting the Panthers by a 19-5 margin.

Florida rebounded in the final frame with goals from Dvorak (two) and Jassen Cullimore, sending the game to overtime. .

As long as we're on the subject of the Panthers, Greg Wyshnyski over at Puck Daddy passes along the report (from George Richards of the Miami Herald) that Brett McLean thinks Sidney Crosby is a liar, and that no challenge was ever issued prior to the drop of the puck in Saturday's game. So, basically, it's all coming down to a bunch of he said, she said. Moving on ...

For the first time in ten games, Petr Prucha was an active member of the New York Rangers. After being a healthy scratch in every game since early November, the Rangers decided to activate Prucha for their game against Pittsburgh, and the 26-year old forward not only skated, but scored a game-tying goal late in the third period of New York's 3-2 shootout win.

Early on, I was thinking that -- and this is all just speculation on my part, it's probably 110% opposite of the reality -- maybe the Rangers decided to dress Prucha for this game to possibly showcase him to the Penguins, who are in need of young wingers. Prucha is in desperate need of a change of scenery, and as the folks over at Penguins blog, The Confluence, pointed out this week, wingers for Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin have been a revolving door of, well -- it's been a revolving door. Let's just leave it at that. Not that Prucha, an enigma if there ever was one, would instantly solve that, but, hey, I'm just speculating here.

Anyway, Prucha jammed home a rebound off the boards behind the net with five minutes to play in the third period, while the Rangers smoked Penguins goalie Dany Sabourin on all three shootout attempts to pick up the extra point.