from Alex Prewitt of Capitals Insider,

As the first postgame question came Sunday night, Coach Barry Trotz reviewed the events of the Washington Capitals’ 2-0 victory over the Boston Bruins in his mind and considered the juxtaposition. Forty-eight hours earlier, he had derided a listless defeat against the Dallas Stars and commanded his players to patch their problems, to which they responded by calling a closed-door meeting. He called a surprise practice the next day and put the Capitals on blast, threatening lineup demotions. He proclaimed that hosting Boston would truly reveal the character of a group reeling from two straight home defeats.

And now, after goaltender Braden Holtby made 32 saves, center Nicklas Backstrom claimed the franchise’s assists lead, defenseman Nate Schmidt scored his first goal of the season and the team staved off the foe in closest pursuit of its top Eastern Conference wild card spot, Trotz needed little time to answer what was posed: Could he have asked for a better response?

“Not really,” Trotz said. “I think that just shows there is good leadership in the room. They had to make it happen. There’s a great response. They had the closed door [meeting]. We had to get urgent, let’s get playing well. I thought we came out, good start, I thought we had a lot of urgency, we had a lot of detail, we had a lot of commitment, got big penalty kills when we needed, got great goaltending from Holtby. A lot of good things. All over I thought we had pretty good structure against a pretty good team.”

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