Washington Capitals

— The NHL's holiday break ended Monday when games resumed around the league, but apparently no one told the Washington Capitals. Facing the Buffalo Sabres at First Niagara Center after a two-day break, the Capitals looked uninspired, rarely sustained possession and didn't offer much response when challenged to win a battle for the puck in the opening 20 minutes. Turns out the four-goal lead the Sabres accumulated in the first period would be all they needed to hand Washington a decisive, demoralizing 4-2 loss.

Over the past week, the Washington Capitals wondered where their offense had gone, but Tuesday night at Verizon Center against the stingy Nashville Predators they found the power switch again. Alex Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom and Alexander Semin scored in the same game for the first time since Oct. 30, 2010, to lead the Capitals to a 4-1 win over Nashville, which had won five games in a row. "We played a good game 60 minutes tonight," said Backstrom, who added to his team lead in goals (12)

If the Washington Capitals' meeting with the Philadelphia Flyers on Tuesday night truly represented a measuring stick of their progress under coach Dale Hunter, as players billed it in the hours leading up to the game, then they came up far short. Washington fell, 5-1, at Verizon Center in a game in which its offense fell dormant for stretches, the defensive zone coverage eroded and the goaltending allowed soft goals. The Capitals are 3-4 under Hunter and have lost six of their past nine.

Over the weekend at the Washington Capitals' practice facility in Arlington, Va., Jason Chimera sprayed water around the dressing room after his group won a scrimmage in a shootout. It was all in jest, as though the players had won the Stanley Cup, but it's the kind of thing that teammates have come to expect from the jovial veteran, who is on pace for a career-best season. Through the first third of the 2011-12 campaign, Chimera is tied for the team lead in goals (11), second in plus-minus rating (plus-9)

On Tuesday night, professional ice hockey was back in Baltimore for the first time since 1997. However, the ice -- which is kind of a key ingredient in ice hockey -- didn't hold up well inside of a steamy 1st Mariner Arena as the Nashville Predators shut out the Washington Capitals, 2-0, in the inaugural Baltimore Hockey Classic. Outside of Baltimore, which sold out the event, the story line was the slushy ice conditions . It affected the quality of play on the ice, and after the game, several players admitted that they were worried about safety.

On a recent skate down memory lane, Washington Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau stopped for a few seconds to think of the perfect adjectives to describe the die hard hockey fans who wore out their vocal cords and rattled the Plexiglas at the Baltimore Arena during the spring of 1985. "There weren't a lot of them, but they were … boisterous and fabulous," said Boudreau, who was then a 30-year-old forward who helped the Baltimore Skipjacks advance to the 1984-85 American Hockey League finals.

On Tuesday, on a court renowned for housing some of Baltimore's best basketball, Kenyetta Riddick calmly moved into position between the plastic pipes. On her 11th birthday, the exceedingly polite girl with glasses strapped on goalie pads for the first time and was nearly unbeatable in net. Playing at The Dome — where, since the 1980s, the city's elite basketball players have thrown down — Kenyetta and her sister, Kennisha, 13, helped lead the Mary E. Rodman Recreation Center team to a 3-0 victory against the Robert C. Marshall squad in the final of the inaugural 2011 NHL Street Hockey Tournament.

After all of the previous postseason disappointments, this spring was supposed to be the one that ended differently for the Washington Capitals. Wednesday night, though, there would be no furious comeback, no heroics from the star-studded lineup to match the Tampa Bay Lightning's killer instinct. There would be no win in the second round, either. The Lightning captured a 5-3 win in Game 4 at the St.Pete Times Forum to complete a tidy four-game sweep of the Capitals in the Eastern Conference semifinals that took all of six days.

After patiently sitting along a back wall for nearly a half hour, 10-year-old Kaenetra Everett could finally test the new hockey equipment sitting neatly in the corner of the gymnasium. "This is the first time they've brought hockey to this community so that we can play," Everett said after practicing faceoffs, shooting and passing with her friends. "For practice, I think I did good." The equipment arrived at Robert C. Marshall Recreation Center in West Baltimore's Upton neighborhood Wednesday as part of NHL Street, a league-wide program which brings street hockey to children ages 6-16 in cities where ice rinks may not be available.

On paper, it was a mismatch. Advantage, Washington Capitals. The Caps have the NHL's best record this season. They were looking to set a franchise record for points in a season and wrap up the No. 1 seed in the Eastern Conference. They lead the NHL in goals scored, by a wide margin. The Carolina Hurricanes, meanwhile, had eight players in the lineup Thursday night who have played in the American Hockey League this season. They had rookie forwards, rookie defensemen. In the end, it took a shootout to decide it. It was just that even for 65 minutes, before the Hurricanes emerged with a 3-2 victory at the RBC Center on Chad LaRose's goal.