The forward "won't be playing anytime soon" after Carolina Hurricanes winger Warren Foegele cross-checked him from behind in the third period of the Capitals' 2-1 loss Thursday, head coach Todd Reirden said postgame.
Barkov is coming off a career-high 96-point season. He also finished second among NHL forwards in ice time while being penalized for just eight minutes. He's been a finalist for the award twice but hasn't won.
O'Reilly, who's also been nominated for the Selke Trophy, will be seeking his second Lady Byng after winning in 2013-14 with the Colorado Avalanche. He racked up a career-high 77 points this season while totaling just 12 penalty minutes.
Monahan, a first-time nominee, is also fresh off the best regular season of his career, establishing new highs in goals (34) and assists (48).
Toronto Maple Leafs head coach Mike Babcock doesn't believe Drake's presence at the Scotiabank Arena on Wednesday night had anything to do with his team's loss.
"That's probably the craziest thing I've ever heard," Babcock said Thursday, according to Sportsnet's Luke Fox. "Anytime somebody wants to come and support us, we're all in."
Drake was in attendance and wore a Maple Leafs jersey for Toronto's 6-4 loss to the Boston Bruins.
The Grammy-award winning artist has a history of "cursing" teams by showing support prior to an event. Alabama's 2019 football team was the latest victim of the perceived curse, with Serena Williams, Conor McGregor, and the Toronto Raptors among the other victims over the years.
During the 2019 NFL playoffs, Drake wore a sweatshirt with the logos of the four remaining teams to avoid hexing one specific franchise.
AS Roma of Italy's Serie A soccer league recently placed a ban on their players from appearing in pictures with Drake to avoid the curse.
With the series between Toronto and Boston heading back to TD Garden tied at two games apiece, Maple Leafs fans are likely hoping Drake travels to Massachusetts in the Bruins' colors for Friday's contest.
Pittsburgh Penguins captain Sidney Crosby won't represent Canada at the 2019 IIHF World Championship following his team's disappointing exit from the NHL postseason.
"I'm just going to try to make the most of the rest," he said during the Penguins' locker room cleanout. "No significant injuries, but as you get older, there are things that nag you."
The New York Islanders' sweep of the Penguins will give Crosby his longest offseason since the conclusion of the 2014-2015 campaign. He's played in 64 playoff games over the past four years.
After recording 100 points in 79 games this past regular season, the 31-year-old was held to just one assist in four playoff contests versus the Islanders.
Despite the loss, Crosby insisted he has faith in Pittsburgh's roster moving forward.
"It's always easy to point fingers when you lose ... I definitely have confidence in this group," he said, according to Wes Crosby of The Associated Press.
Welcome to Art of the Mask, a new video series in which theScore sits down with some of the world's top netminders to talk about goalie mask art.
In Episode 2, Filip Gustavsson of the Belleville Senators runs through his mask's personalized and standardized elements. From pop culture nods to a story of an errant dressing room chair, there's a lot of depth to Gustavsson's mask art.
No moment emphasized the magnitude of Game 4 in Toronto on Wednesday night quite like the point when, a few minutes in, a TV camera panned high above the ice and settled on Drake. The local rapper deigned to support his hometown Maple Leafs in person - despite not appearing courtside, as is his custom, at either of his beloved Raptors' first home playoff games.
Facing the prospect of a 3-1 series deficit, the importance of the occasion moved Boston Bruins coach Bruce Cassidy to make a drastic change. Move David Pastrnak down a rung in the lineup, his thinking went, and maybe each member of hockey's most dangerous line could shake his respective quiet start to the series.
In a sense, Cassidy's gambit worked beautifully. The Bruins won an enthralling 6-4 showdown with Pastrnak, Brad Marchand, and Patrice Bergeron playing but two shifts together at even-strength.
Still, Boston now has a curious decision to make as the series returns to TD Garden for Game 5. Cassidy could let this result speak for itself and leave Danton Heinen in Pastrnak's usual spot on Bergeron's right wing. Or he could reunite his No. 1 line in accordance with another argument: that the fleeting sequences in which the Bruins' stars skated together are what powered Boston to victory on a night the opponent dominated the run of play.
Icon Sportswire / Getty Images
Three minutes into the second period, shortly after Auston Matthews scored to erase Boston's early lead, Cassidy deployed Pastrnak with Marchand and Bergeron on a faceoff for the first time at even strength. The shift culminated in Pastrnak tipping home his first goal of the playoffs on a slick feed from Marchand, whom Bergeron had sprung on a two-on-one with a timely chip out of the defensive zone.
Fewer than two minutes later, with Matthews banished to the box for a roughing penalty, Pastrnak slipped unabated into the slot - all four Leaf defenders were caught puck-watching on one side of the ice - and fired a one-timer past Frederik Andersen on another pretty Marchand pass.
"(Pastrnak is) a guy we rely on to score and create offense," Cassidy said after the game. "Scorers, when they don't score, can get antsy. I'm not saying David was there, but we wanted to keep him from going there."
The Bruins nearly unraveled in the frantic last 10 minutes of the third period - the seemingly inevitable product of allowing 47 Toronto scoring chances to their 26 - but those flashes of synchronized brilliance were almost enough on their own to put Boston ahead for good.
Claus Andersen / Getty Images
And even though Zdeno Chara's clinching goal officially went down without an assist, it, too, was keyed by contributions from the big guns. Marchand lifted Zach Hyman's stick on an end-around to let the puck slide to Chara at the point, and Bergeron blocked Andersen's view of the ensuing shot with a textbook screen.
After getting slammed at even-strength in Boston's losses in Games 1 and 3, Chara and defense partner Charlie McAvoy joined Bergeron, Marchand, and Heinen as the only Bruins to generate a scoring-chance margin at or above 50 percent. Together they outshone Toronto's top five-man unit of John Tavares, Mitch Marner, Hyman, Jake Muzzin, and Nikita Zaitsev - the source of the Bergeron line's shared headache in the matchups that preceded Wednesday's puck drop.
For the Bruins, the dispiriting subtext of this information is that, to a man, each of their other lines and pairings got caved in. Morgan Rielly excelled in extended action against Boston's new second line of Pastrnak, David Krejci, and Jake DeBrusk. Toronto's third forward trio was overwhelmingly good, though none of William Nylander, Patrick Marleau, and Connor Brown found the back of the net.
"We did a lot of good things tonight. We generated a lot of chances, got a lot of pucks to the net," Tavares said postgame. "We just probably made too many mistakes at certain points in the game."
Mark Blinch / National Hockey League / Getty Images
Beyond the play of Pastrnak and his usual running mates, the Bruins will head home buoyed by a couple of other encouraging trends. Their power-play clicked at 25.9 percent - the third-highest rate in the league - during the regular season; Pastrnak's second goal in Game 4, combined with McAvoy's first of the series, upped Boston's first-round success rate with the man advantage to a sparkling 5-for-11. Toronto's power play is 3-for-10 overall.
Tuukka Rask, meanwhile, should have saved the Matthews wrister that tied the score 2-2, but he made some other crucial stops, including a point-blank denial when Brown found himself alone at the side of the crease with Toronto down 4-2 in the second period. Rask now has a .942 save percentage at even strength for the series, just below Andersen's .943.
The slimness of the margin separating these goalies and their teams, combined with the scarcity of time to make adjustments in the playoffs, is what prompted Cassidy to split up his scuffling stars. Whether Pastrnak returns to the first line on Friday or not, it's clear that Game 5 will loom just as large as the spectacle that attracted Drake.
"I think when we're able to separate those guys a little bit, you're able to see more opportunities for them, and overall, I think they can just play with anyone," McAvoy said. "They're great players. They can adapt to whoever is on their wings.
"And we need them. We need them. It was nice to see them all play a hand - a big hand - in tonight's game."
— With files from theScore's John Matisz
Nick Faris is a features writer at theScore. He's on Twitter @nickmfaris.
Mark Stone, Ryan O'Reilly, and Patrice Bergeron are the finalists for the 2019 Selke Trophy as the NHL's top forward who best excels in defensive aspects of the game, the league announced Wednesday.
Stone, who was dealt to the Vegas Golden Knights at the trade deadline, is the lone winger up for the award but is certainly deserving of recognition. The 26-year-old notched a career-high 73 points while maintaining a Corsi For relative to his teammates of 8.6 and notching 122 takeaways. A winger hasn't won the award since Jere Lehtinen in 2002-03.
O'Reilly made a tremendous impact in his debut season with the St. Louis Blues, also hitting a career high in points with 77. He started over 50 percent of his even-strength shifts in the defensive zone and was dominant in the faceoff circle, winning 56.9 percent of his draws.
Bergeron is up for the award for a seventh consecutive year. If he's chosen, he'll be the only player in NHL history to win the Selke five times. The 33-year-old appeared in just 65 games this season but notched 79 points, boasted a Corsi For rating of 57 percent, and won 56.6 percent of his faceoffs.
Juuse Saros, who posted a .915 save percentage and a 2.62 goals-against average during the regular season, replaced Rinne between the pipes.
Rinne was integral in Nashville's victory in Game 3, as the Preds held on to win 3-2 despite being outshot 42-28. He entered Game 4 with a .936 save percentage and a 1.98 goals-against average in the series.
The Jekyll and Hyde act is nothing new for Rinne in the postseason. There have been times, most notably during the 2017 Cup run, when he's been lights-out, but in other instances, such as last year's playoffs, he's struggled.
