Kuemper, Caps blank Nashville, 3-0

In Nashville, the Washington Capitals’ Darcy Kuemper made 34 saves in a 3-0 shutout of the Predators on Saturday.“I was feeling good coming into the game about the way my game has been trending,” Kuemper said. “Tonight, the guys did a great job in front of me, so it made my job a lot easier. When you are seeing pucks clean and everything like that, you can kind of get into the rhythm.”

It was his first shutout with the Caps.

“I liked the directness of the game that we played, the decisions we made with the puck,” Washington coach Peter Laviolette said. “I liked the way we defended. [The Predators] are a physical team. We had to show up and be physically ready, so it was a lot of positives tonight.”

Beck Malenstyn staked the Caps to a 1-0 lead in the middle frame.

“I thought we played really well,” Laviolette said. “When you lose one player, it’s tough. You are swinging the bench in different ways, but you lose two players, one forward, one defenseman and it’s pretty early on in the game, then you are really juggling it for the rest of the game. I thought our guys did an excellent job. We put a lot of minutes on guys, and I thought they responded really well.”

Nashville has gone 1-5-1 since winning two games in the Global Series in Europe.

“The first period was a lot of odd-man chances for them,” the Preds Filip Forsberg said. “But second period we had chances. [Kuemper] made some great saves, obviously. Those are the type of chances that we have to bury in a game that’s 0-0 at the time. Obviously, we struggled with that all night.”

Washington extended the lead to 2-0 with 6:44 gone in the third period on a strike from Aliaksei Protas.

Alex Ovechkin scored an empty-net for the 3-0 final, late in the third.

“It’s definitely a disappointing loss,” Nashville captain Roman Josi said. “It just wasn’t good enough. We didn’t start well enough. We didn’t start the way we wanted. We knew what our identity was and we didn’t do it in the first period. I thought it got better as the game went on, but we’ve got to make sure we do it right away.”

Juuse Saros made 32 saves in the Preds loss.