Caps edge Buffalo

In Buffalo, Vitek Vanecek made 30 saves, and the Washington Capitals defeated the Sabres, 4-3, on Friday night.

Alex Ovechkin scored his 727th career goal.

Justin Schultz and Brenden Dillon also scored for the Caps.

“Not the effort or the result we wanted last night. So it was important for us to come out tonight and get the two points,” Schultz said of the Capitals, who lost 4-2 to the Boston Bruins on Thursday. “I thought we played pretty well. There’s some areas of improvement, but we got the job done. It was a tough back to back. And we can move on now.”

Henri Jokiharju, Casey Mittelstadt and Tage Thompson were the Sabres’ striekrs.

“It’s something we’ve been emphasizing is just get more pucks to the net, getting harder on the forecheck, putting pressure on people’s [defense] and trying to get pucks back,” Mittelstadt said, “Obviously ‘Aspy’ did a great job there. He pulled the puck away and made a great pass to me. My job wasn’t so hard, just made a little move on the side of the net.”

Jakub Vrana scored for the Caps to give them a 4-2 lead midway through the third period.

“It was a big goal,” Capitals head coach Peter Laviolette said. “Great play by Schultzy I think to slide it to him. He’s got a really got shot, an unbelievable shot. It’s quick. It’s usually on point and it was nice to see him deliver that. You take a goal like that and build some confidence off it and have it moving in the right direction as well.”

Washington gained two points on the New York Islanders, who lost to the Rangers, 4-1.

“We were talking about it for a long time now, getting the pucks on the blue line and trying to create something in front of the net and we did that today,” Vrana said. “We got rewarded for it. Just overall game, I still think there are some windows we can still be better at, but like ‘Schultzy’ said it was a big win for us, especially feeling good about going to the next game.”

Dustin Tokarski made 29 saves in the loss.

“The effort had to be better tonight. I was happy to see the players had that bad taste in their mouth,” Sabres coach Don Granato said of his team, which lost 6-3 to the New Jersey Devils on Thursday. “The sense I got from them was they wanted a little bit of redemption tonight. The only thing you can control is your effort and your resolve, and we showed both despite trailing early and trailing late. Kept fighting all the way to the end. … The outcome being a loss, we’re not happy about that. But the other components were where they should be.”