Saturday, June 23, 2018

A Long Time Coming, Part Three

This is the final post in a series about the Washington Capitals winning this year's Stanley Cup. The first two can be read here and here.

Where does one start when trying to describe the reasons that this year's Stanley Cup championship is so special? It's hard to know because there are so many reasons to cite.

There were plenty of noteworthy things about the Capitals' playoff run in and of itself, aside from the human element: Like the fact that 10 of their 16 wins were on the road, including all of their series-winners, and the fact that they won the Cup despite being behind in all four series. Each of those was a historical first.

Then there is the fact that the Caps' shooting was so good that they sniped Vegas goalie Marc-Andre Fleury into a subterranean save percentage of .856 for the Stanley Cup Final -- after he had been so good during the first three rounds that he had registered a save percentage of .947 and was having arguably the best post-season of any goaltender in history.

There is of course the many-layered narrative of redemption and patience, which I touched on in previous posts, but among those layers is one I failed to mention: The serene and priorities-straight skipper, Barry Trotz, finally getting the feather in his cap that had long eluded him. A head coach for 19 consecutive seasons (the first 15 in Nashville and last four in D.C.), Trotz is the fifth-winningest coach in NHL history and has had just one losing season in the last 14 years. He is almost certain to move past Al Arbour into the #4 spot next year.

Although everyone who is in a position to know says great things about Trotz both as a coach and as a human being, there have always been critics who tsk-tsk about him not having won a Cup or gotten to a conference final. Well, now their argument has finally been chucked aside!

There is also the rags-to-riches story of Ted Leonsis, the Brooklyn-born, Maryland-residing son of immigrant millworkers from Greece. He purchased the Capitals in 1999 and has poured his heart and soul into delivering a championship to the metro area he first embraced when he was a student at Georgetown.

But hockey, like all sports, is much, much, much more about the players than about the owners and coaches, so it is time to focus on them.

When you look at this Capitals roster, it is not an exaggeration to say that every player on it has a story that will pull on at least one of your heart strings. But there is not time enough in this post to deal with all of them, so I will only deal with some... and since I've already talked about Alexander Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom and Lars Eller and Braden Holtby in prior posts, I will focus largely on some of the others in this one.

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Evgeny Kuznetsov
Kuzy's 32 points (12 goals, 20 assits) marked the first time in eight years, and just the sixth time in the past 25, that a player has recorded 30 or more points in a post-season. That, combined with the fact that this was only his fourth full season in North America and he just recently turned 26, goes to prove what many of us already knew: He is an elite talent for whom the sky is the celing.

Even though Kuznetsov was there for the Capitals' flameouts in 2016 and 2017, he never seemed to get sphincter-tightened by franchise history. Instead he has always played confident and loose, a trait that is perhaps best exemplified by his flapping-bird goal celebration, which I originally assumed was just his quirky way of honoring the bald eagle in the team's logo -- but it turns out he does it because his daughter likes it, and that goes to prove something else many of us already knew: Kuznetsov should be hyped as one of the faces of the NHL.


T.J. Oshie
The vast majority of hockey fans came to appreciate Oshie when he led Team USA to victory over Team Russia in the 2014 Winter Olympics by scoring four goals in the shootout. Due to his tearful on-ice comments about his father Tim after the Caps won the Cup 16 days ago, an equally vast majority now know that Tim has Alzheimer's.

But did you know that Tim was only 48 when he was diagnosed, and that other members of Oshie's family have been struck with the disease at a frighteningly early age?

Did you know his family is one of only about 200 on Earth whose genes carry a marker that makes them succeptible to Alzeimer's striking people as young as in their thirties? Did you know that T.J. himself has refused to be tested, and did you know that his sister has been mentally disabled since birth, due to the umbilical cord getting wrapped around her neck during delivery and depriving her brain of oxygen?

With all that in mind, it's more than understandable why Oshie was re-signed by the Caps last year largely because of his ability to not wallow in the downsides of things, or, as he remarked: "I just don't understand negativity."

He deserves his championship ring as much as anybody, and his 21 points in 24 playoff games this year -- highlighted by the opening goal in Game Four and a pair of dazzling assists in Game One -- show he was a contributing force and not simply along for the ride.


Devante Smith-Pelly
In my May 14, 2014 post, which was basically about black hockey players, I typed the following words: "...out west, 21-year-old Devante Smith-Pelly has scored three goals in the last two games to stake his Anaheim Ducks to a 3-2 series lead over their cross-town rival, the LA Kings." Smith-Pelly was a baller in those playoffs, and even though he has never been one to generate eye-popping season stats, I've never seen him play a bad game and never really understood why he bounced around from Anaheim to Montreal to New Jersey without sticking.

Well, I'm guessing that the problem is now solved. This was his first season in Washington and although he scored only seven goals in the regular season, his "when they count" numbers sure as hell don't appear modest when you see that he scored seven goals in the playoffs and they tended to come in pivotal situations.

And those numbers sure as heller don't seem modest when you consider that the bulk of his playoff point-production came in the Eastern Conference Final and Stanley Cup Final. No matter what he does in normal time, Smith-Pelly comes through big when it's clutch time, both on the score sheet and on the hit count -- a la Claude Lemieux.


John Carlson
Carlson was a first round pick who has played only for the Caps, been a regular since 2009, and has for some time been one of the NHL's best two-way defensemen. There have been five full seasons in which he did not miss a game. Nevertheless, for much of his career he has not gotten much press attention.

Even now, after a stellar post-season and 68-point regular season have finally garnered him some considerable accolades, Carlson still has plenty of detractors who question his worth no matter what he does. Detractors like the eternally fair-minded Ryan Lambert, who recently wrote of Carlson that "it strikes me as hard to not-score 50 points a year behind that first power play unit." Never mind that playing behind that power play unit means you are playing on that power play unit, in Carlson's case manning the point to unleash shots and distribute passes. Never mind the possibility that your outstanding play might be one of the reasons that unit is so good, rather than your presence on that unit resulting in you dumb-lucking your way to a good season.

But I digress. Carlson was a force this post-season and now most people, save for Ryan Lambert and his ilk, acknowledge how good he is. Washington could not have won the Cup without his contributions.


Dmitry Orlov
On the team of Alexander Mikhailovich Ovechkin and Evgeny Yevgenyevich Kuznetsov, we had better not forget about Dmitry Vladimirovich Orlov. And yes, that's partly because I like the sound of Russian patronymic middle names, which I learned abut from this professor in 1989 and 1990, but it's also because Orlov is a rock solid defenseman who never lets you down, at least not as long as you are cheering for the Washingtin Capitals in the NHL and/or Team Russia in international tourneys.

Orlov is not flashy, but along the same lines, he is not mistake-prone and seems to always make the right decisions at the right times. He has not missed a game since four seasons ago, and his points production has been remarkably consistent as he has tallied between 29 and 33 in each of the last three years. Despte playing defense, he generated eight points versus four penalty minutes during this post-season, and he seemed to make a positive difference for his team every time he stepped on the ice.

Players like Ornov may not be fodder for the highlight reels, but they are invaluable when it comes to winning championships.


Brooks Orpik
There is no denying that this 37-year-old, California-born, New York-raised, left-hand-shooting blueliner has been a washed-up shell of his former self for the last few seasons. And with his contract running through the end of next season at an AAV of $5.5 million, there had for some time been a lot of talk about whether the Caps should buy out the remainder of his contract and put him to pasture to make room on the roster for younger, more productive players.

But when this post-season rolled around, Orpik proved what Toby Keith once claimed to have proved: That he can be as good, albeit just once, as he ever was. And the good news is that Orpik's "once" meant not just one night, but one whole entire post-season that ended with him lifting Lord Stanley's Cup on the ice in Las Vegas. He played sound defense, tallied five points, and scored the winning goal in Game Two of the Stanley Cup Final to even the series at one apiece. You gotta be happy for him.

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The Already Mentioned
I already talked about what a force Alex Ovechkin was, but I have to add this: He scored 15 goals this post-season, which is tied for the fifth best post-season in history. And I will also add this: He has led the NHL in goals three of the last four seasons, despite his age across those seasons (he turns 33 in September) being what media folk like to consider too "advanced."

I already talked about Lars Eller, but I have to say this again: He became the first person from Denmark to drink from Lord Stanley's Cup, but that was not all because he scored the Cup-winning goal to boot. And I have to add that he proved his value not only by making key plays from his center ice position on the third line, but also by moving up to the second line and taking Backstrom's place when the latter was uncharacteristically forced out of the lineup by injury for the last two games of the second round and first two of the third.

Speaking of Backstrom, I already talked about how he has played only for the Caps since they drafted him and how he has averaged nearly a point per game across 11 seasons, and how he almost never misses a game. But today I have to mention that he racked up 23 points in 20 games these playoffs, and I have to repeat that among those points was a beautiful cross-ice assist to Ovechkin in the Stanley Cup Final's decisive Game Five.

And I already said this about goaltender Braden Holtby: He pitched back to back shutouts in Games Six and Seven of the Eastern Conference Final, against a team that had been shut out only one time in the previous 13 months. And he began the post-season as Washington's backup after losing his starting job to Philipp Grubauer, but then was reinserted for that season-defining Game Three against Columbus in the first round -- which has to be repeated when you consider that many people I have previously delighted in accusing Holtby of choking when it mattered.

*     *     *     *     *

For years, I have been pretty good about not holding a grudge against the Cup-winning team when it is not my own.

But this year I actually got great enjoyment from the Cup victory of a team that is not my own. And I don't think I am alone, because how can you not get a kick out of watching the Caps dive into water fountains and watching Ovechkin cling to the Cup like it's his long lost son that he's been seeking for decades?

Xenophobic know-nothings used to say that Ovie didn't care whether or not he won the Cup because he was born "over there" and doesn't get how big a deal it is to Canadians and Americans. Are you kidding me? He cares so much and is relishing this victory so much that I'm wondering if he'll voluntarily give the Cup back to the HHOF like he's supposed to. I'm wondering if the NHL will need to enlist the help of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Royal Canadian Mounted Police to wrest it back from his clutches... and that is awesome!

Congrats to the Caps and happiness for their fans. They deserve it.


Note:  There have been post-scripts to the championshiop, like there are always are between the end of the Cup Final and the end of June, when contracts officially expire and before which moves can be made. Next year, Barry Trotz will be coaching the New York Islanders thanks to an obscure contract provision kicking in, and Brooks Orpik will be playing God-knows-where due to a business decision needing to be made on his too-hefty deal. But this is not the time or place to deal with those issues. For the purposes of this post, and for countless numbers of hockey fans in and around the U.S. capital, all that matters is that in 2018 the Washington Capitals are the champions of the world.

Thursday, June 21, 2018

Summer Solstice



Because I do not like hot weather, summer is my least favorite season. But there are still things I enjoy about it, and surprisingly, some of them are specific to this sweat-soaked state in which I live. So here are some thoughts on summer’s first day:

I love Independence Day.

I love that there is one time of year when I am able to prefer chilled white wine over room temperature red wine.

I love when evening breezes carry the sweet scent of orange blossoms across Florida.

I love watching swallow-tailed kites, one of my favorite birds of prey, as they soar in the air and seem to stay up there forever without flapping their wings.

I love seeing hummingbirds hover around the blossoms of honeysuckle and aloe.

I love watching fireflies illuminate the woods at dusk.

I love San Diego.

And I love the dramatic pulse of Florida’s afternoon storms, when black clouds darken the sky and spew lighting and thunder and unleash torrents of blinding rain – only to blow away and be replaced by sunny skies in less than an hour.

Thursday, June 14, 2018

Flag Day

This being Flag Day, I feel like again re-publishing my post from 2011, which "illustrates" the lyrics to God Bless America using photographs I've taken throughout our country:


God bless America...


Land that I love...


Stand beside her and guide her...


Through the night...


With the light from above...


From the mountains...



To the prairies...

To the oceans white with foam...

God bless America...

My home sweet home...


Note: The final picture was taken by Kelly Noel.

Tuesday, June 12, 2018

A Long Time Coming, Part Two

This is the second post of a three-part series about the Washington Capitals winning this year's Stanley Cup. The first can be read here, and it ended with me rattling about how this season began with everyone except the Capitals' players and coaches assuming that their window of opportunity had closed.


During the summer of 2017 Karl Alzner, Justin Williams, Marcus Johansson, and William Shattenkirk were all shed from the Washington Capitals organization, one year after Nate Schmidt got shed. And obviously those who remained were getting older not younger, with Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom and T.J. Oshie all barreling into their thirties having never reached a conference final, much less a Stanley Cup Final.

When you combine that with the fact that the 2017-18 season was the third one after the team's own GM, Brian MacLellan, declared that there were only two seasons remaining before its window closed... well, you can see why people thought the Caps were done.

I would be lying if I said that I didn't think they were done. But I am not lying when I say that a part of me also thought the removal of expectations could actually work in their favor by making them play less uptight.

Plus, Evgeny Kuznetsov is younger than all those guys who got shed and he is also a significantly better player who is still improving. And Andre Burakovsky is significantly younger than them and he played better than them during the 2017 playoffs. So shifting the franchise's focus in a fresh direction should not automatically be considered bad, right?

Washington proceeded to finish the 2017-18 regular season with 105 points, tied for the league's sixth-best record. That sounds like regression compared to the fact that they had the best record each of the previous two seasons, but then again, having the sixth-best record in a 31-team league is damn good; and 105 points was good enough to win the Metropolitan Division and guarantee home ice through at least two playoff rounds; and Ovechkin led the league in goals with 49, which was 16 more than he scored the year prior. I daresay that heading into this post-season, no one should have considered them apples to be bad.

*     *     *     *     *

The eternal pessimists raised their voices when the Caps dropped the first two games of the opening round on home ice. Which, just to be clear, was one hundred percent understandable.

But when Ovechkin stood in the locker room after Game Two and said "it's going to be fun when we bounce back and gonna tie the series and come back here and play Game Five at home," it felt like he really knew that was going to happen and wasn't just blowing sunshine up the media's ass.

Of course the comeback wasn't easy, and of course it had plenty of moments when Washington fans were chewing their fingernails down to the skin. Game Three went almost halfway into double overtime before Lars Eller kept hope alive when the puck caromed off of him past Columbus goaltender Sergei Bobrovsky for the winner. The Caps then went on to win Games Four through Six as well, turning a 2-0 series deficit into a 4-2 series win and advancing to Round Two with a head of steam and wave of confidence.

Just imagine if Eller had not scored in that second overtime, and someone from Columbus had found the twine instead? The Caps would have been in a near-insurmountable 3-0 hole, and given their history of playoff failures (see my link above) do you really think they would have come back from that? But of course, the point is moot.

Having vanquished the Blue Jackets, they moved on to face the Pittsburgh Penguins, who have historically been their inescapable tormentors and vanquishers (again, see my link above). However this year's Caps were ready to flip the script, and flip it they did.

Pittsburgh had won the last two Stanley Cups, both times eliminating Washington in the second round. In fact, all three of their Cups in the last nine calendar years, and all five of their Cups in franchise history, were won after eliminating Washington. This spring, however, was destined to be different, and Game Six faced off in Pittsburgh with the Caps holding a 3-2 series edge and eager to end things short of a Game Seven

It went to overtime tied at one, and a little more than five minutes into the extra session Ovechkin intercepted the puck and fed a perfect outlet pass to Kuznetsov, springing his 25-year-old countryman on a breakaway. Kuznetsov raced downstream and beat Matt Murray stick side for the winner, lifting a thousand-ton weight off the shoulders of the franchise and its fans and sending the Capitals to the conference finals for the third time in their 44-year history.

Once there they advanced by beating the Tampa Bay Lightning in a full-bore, ultra-competitive, seven-game tilt. As a Lightning fan I would rather skip past this part of Washington's story, but as a hockey fan writing about hockey, I cannot. So I will just point out that after the Caps won the first two games, the Bolts won three straight to seize a 3-2 series lead. But then Washington netminder Braden Holtby pitched back to back shutouts in Games Six and Seven, helping the Caps propel themselves to the Stanley Cup Final... and fyi, those back to back shutouts were against a Tampa Bay squad that led the NHL in goals and had been shut out only one time in the previous 13 months.

And speaking of Holtby, who was raised and reared in Saskatchewan, did I mention that he began the post-season as Washington's backup after losing his starting job to Philipp Grubauer? Did I mention he was reinserted for that season-defining Game Three against Columbus in the first round, and that he never surrendered the net again?

*     *     *     *     *

By the time the Stanley Cup Final faced off in Las Vegas, there was a palpable feeling of destiny surrounding this season's Capitals. Even after they dropped Game One of the SCF, you just had a sense that this was their time to win it all.

They gutted out a 3-2 victory in Game Two -- partly due to this career-defining save by Holtby late in regulation -- to "steal home ice advantage" away from the Vegas Golden Knights and head back to Washington with the series knotted at one. Once there, they grabbed control by beating Vegas 3-1 in Game Three and doubling that score to defeat them 6-2 in Game Four. They were skating with purpose and resolution and looking every bit the champions they were about to become.

Not that the Knights were going to make it easy on them when the series shifted back to Vegas for Game Five. No championship is easy to achieve and no elimination game is easy to win.

Washington did score first in Game Five when Jakub Vrana got the puck past Marc-Andre Fleury 6:24 into the second period, but Vegas punched back hard when former Capital Nate Schmidt tied it up a little over three minutes later... Then Ovechkin put the Caps back on top just 34 seconds after that, with a pinpoint-perfect snipe off a beautiful assist from Backstrom... And then David Perron and Reilly Smith both scored for Vegas before the period was done, handing the Knights a 3-2 advantage and giving their fans reason to hope that the season would continue beyond that evening.

But you cannot stop what is meant to be, and the Capitals grabbed destiny in the final frame. First, Devante Smith-Pelly tied it up with a determined quick-thinking goal with 10:08 remaining. Then, 2:31 later, Eller jumped to a puck that had trickled ever so slightly behind Fleury in the paint, and he knocked it into the gaping net to make the Vegas crowd fall silent.

When Eller put that puck in, it was 4:47 in the morning in his hometown of Rodovre, Denmark, and there was an organized watch party being held in its streets. That night he became the first person from Denmark to drink from Lord Stanley's Cup, but that was not all -- he scored the Cup-winning goal to boot.

*     *     *     *     *

Insanity reigned in the final minutes. The game clock stopped working for a period of time while play continued, leaving viewers in the arena and on TV not knowing how much time remained.

Fortunately for everyone, the clock was restored to working order with less than a minute left.

Unfortunately for Vegas fans, the final face-off, following the usual last-minute icings that occur when a goalie is pulled for an extra attacker, took place with 0.6 seconds remaining. Everyone knows that is not enough time for a team to win the faceoff and get a shot off and have the puck cross the goal line before the horn blows.

Before that final face-off occurred, the Washington players who were on the bench allowed themselves to feel joy because they knew there was not enough time left for the Knights to win the faceoff and get a shot off and have the puck cross the goal line. Ovechkin -- who wears his heart on his sleeve, and had been waiting for this moment for no less than 13 years and perhaps for almost 33 -- got wide-eyed and started pushing his teammates together into an anticipatory and energetic group hug.

Then the puck dropped and that last fraction of a second flew away, and euphoria reigned as Capitals players stormed the ice in celebration.

One of the best-earned adventures in the history of intoxication was about to commence.

To be continued...


Saturday, June 9, 2018

A Long Time Coming, Part One

So now they sit atop the hill. It was a long time coming for the District of Columbia's hockey franchise, but here they are: Washington Capitals, Stanley Cup Champions. Right when everyone had really given up on 'em for once and for all.

A story like this deserves some telling, and to tell it right you have to start from the beginning, so let's go.

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The Capitals first season was 1974-75, when they and the Kansas City Scouts (now known as the New Jersey Devils) joined the NHL as expansion teams. That was back when expansion teams really were expansion teams, meaning they had to start with scraps and crumbs, and with no way of avoiding a long struggle before they could rise even to the level of "does not suck" -- but even with that as your point of reference, the Caps were still historically atrocious in their early years.

Their first season saw them finish with a record of 8-67-5 while enduring a 17-game losing streak and dropping thirty-seven straight on the road. Their second saw them surrender almost five goals per game while limping to the finish line with an 11-59-10 record, at one point going 25 straight games without a win.

The Caps' futility continued throughout the rest of the 1970's, which put them at a competitive disadvantage not just against other NHL teams when trying to earn victories, but against their hometown basketball team when trying to earn a claim on some of the entertainment dollars that residents had in their wallets.

The late 1970's were when the Washington Bullets made back to back trips to the NBA Finals and won the NBA title in 1978. Both franchises were owned by Abe Pollin, and needless to say, it was easier for him to put butts in the seats for Bullets games than for Caps games.

Pollin remained committed to making hockey work in the U.S. capital even when relocation rumors became red hot, and in 1982, the year "Jack and Diane" and "Africa" topped the charts, he made the pivotal decision of hiring David Poille to be the team's GM. In Poille's first transaction he traded for Rod Langway, one of the best stay-at-home defensemen the league has ever seen.

Langway (along with Brian Engblom, who was acquired in the same trade and now does TV color commentary for my Tampa Bay Lightning!) dramatically reduced the Capitals' goals-against average and made them competitive. Concurrent with that, previously drafted forwards Mike Gartner and Bobby Carpenter evolved into productive scorers, and in 1983 the team made its first ever playoff appearance. They were eliminated by the New York Islanders, who would then go on to win the last Cup of their epic dynasty, but there was obviously no shame in that.

They went on to make the playoffs 15 years in a row. An argument can be made that they did not have a lot to show for that 15-year run -- beginning your playoff appearances right when the dynastic Islanders were handing the baton over to the dynastic Oilers, who eight years later would hand it over to the Lemieux-Jagr Penguins, is not a way to establish yourself as a realistic title contender -- but the Caps did make it as deep as the Prince of Wales Conference Final in 1990, and in the decade following that conference final they became one of the league's more entertaining teams to watch.

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The 1990's saw the franchise bring in significant firepower from around the globe, including Slovakian wingers Peter Bondra and Richard Zednik and Russian blueliner Sergei Gonchar (all of whom started their NHL careers with the Caps) plus American defenseman Phil Housley and Canadian forwards Adam Oates and Joe Juneau (all of whom were acquired after already establishing themselves with other franchises).

Bondra spent 14 years with the team, during which he tallied 472 goals and 353 assists and led the NHL in goals for the 1997-98 season. He was a five-time All-Star and to this day holds the franchise record for hat tricks and short-handed goals.

But arguably the biggest addition to the Capitals during the 1990's was the ultimate man without a country: Goaltender Olaf Kolzig, aka Olie the Goalie. Sure, almost everybody who ever watched him play will tell you that Kolzig's from Germany, but in reality he has never, ever lived there.

Kolzig was born in South Africa, to parents who had been born in Germany and retained their German citizenship. When he was a toddler they moved to Denmark and then to Canada, where he began playing hockey at the age of four.

His father worked for Westin Hotels in a position that forced him to keep relocating -- so much so that by he time Kolzig graduated from high school in Union Bay, British Columbia, he had moved 25 times in his 18 years of life. Almost all of those moves were within Canada, which would seem to make him a Canadian, but he never applied for citizenship and that fact enabled him to use a German passport and to play for Germany in international tournaments.

One of the world's best goalies of the 1990's and early 2000's, Kolzig set 13 franchise records that still stand and he won both the Vezina Trophy and King Clancy Memorial Trophy. With him owning the net and the players mentioned above making things happen elsewhere on the ice, the Capitals were fun to watch and appeared on lots of highlight reels. In 1998 they made it all the way to the Stanley Cup Final, only to get swept by the Red Wings juggernaut.

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Seemingly unfazed by that SCF sweep, the Capitals organization kept plugging along for several years during which it kept much of its core both intact and competitive. After the calendar flipped into the next decade (this century!) the Caps added two blue chip Czechs to their already blue chip roster: The mulleted one himself, Jaromir Jagr, plus sharp-shooting winger Robert Lang. They also brought in Lithuanian centerman Dainius Zubrus, giving themselves impressive depth down the middle.

Although not Cup favorites like Detroit or Colorado, they were talented enough that they were "in the conversation" and every year it felt like they could make another deep run. However, that run never materialized and in both 2000 and 2001 they were eliminated in the first round by -- remember this -- the Pittsburgh Penguins. Then they missed the playoffs altogether in 2002.

They made an impressive rebound and returned to the post-season in 2003, facing the Lightning in the first round. The Caps won the first two games in Tampa (I was in attendance at Game One) and then, back on home ice, went to overtime in Game Three while trying to take a commanding-as-can-be 3-0 series lead. But 2:29 into overtime, Tampa Bay's Vinny Lecavalier scored on a rebound to make the series 2-1, and then the Bolts ran the table to win the series 4-2. The decisive Game Six was played on Washington's own ice and ended when Martin St. Louis roofed the winner over Kolzig's left arm four minutes into the third overtime.

As the following season unfolded, the Capitals organization concluded that the roster it had built was not going to win a Cup, and conceded to that conclusion by dismantling its key parts and freeing up money to rebuild. On January 23, 2004, Jagr was traded to the Rangers, then on February 18th Bondra was dealt to Ottawa. Within 15 days of that, Lang had been shipped to Detroit and Gonchar to Boston, with Lang's trade marking the first (and still only) time in NHL history that the league's leading scorer got traded mid-season.

On June 7th of that year, Tampa Bay won the Stanley Cup less than 14 months after beating the Capitals for their first-ever playoff series win... and 19 days after Tampa Bay won the Cup, the 2004 NHL Entry Draft was held and the Capitals, blessed with the top pick from having won the draft lottery, set the course for their future by selecting an 18-year-old Muscovite named Alexander Mikhailovich Ovechkin.

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Ovechkin's hockey greatness is, well, great, so obviously he is not your normal Moscow-raised Russian. But when you look at his family, you will see that he is really not your normal Moscow-raised Russian.

His father Mikhail was a highly regarded soccer player. His mother, Tatyana, was an elite basketball player who helped lead Team USSR to back-to-back Olympic gold medals and six European Championships, and she now runs Russia's national women's basketball program. In other words, Alex Ovechkin's family is sports royalty in the land of his birth -- and in that particular land, being sports royalty comes with an enormous amount of pressure imposed on you by the state.

It was a big deal when the Caps made Ovechkin the #1 pick, and he has proceeded to prove that everyone who called him a can't-miss prospect was absolutely correct. Not yet 33, he is an 11-time All-Star who has led the NHL in goals seven times, including this season. He has thrice been named the league's most valuable player as voted by the media, and thrice named its most outstanding player as voted by the players themselves. Despite playing in the golden age of NHL goaltending, he has rung up nine seasons of 40 or more goals, including seven seasons of 50+ and one season when he scored 65. He won the hardest shot challenge at this year's All-Star Weekend Skills Competition (his clocked in at 101.3 miles per hour) in addition to winning the competition's breakaway challenge in 2008, 2009, and 2011.

All of which goes to illustrate that Ovechkin, often called Ovie, was the perfect franchise player with whom to start a rebuild and around whom to build a title contender. And there is no doubt that the Capitals organization has done everything it could to achieve that goal in the 14 years since they drafted him.

In 2006 they drafted Nicklas Backstrom. Both of them are still with the team and still at the top of their games, with Backstrom having averaged nearly a point per game across his 11 seasons. There have been seven seasons in which he did not miss a single game, and this year he missed only one.

Other top flight players brought in during the team's "Ovechkin era" include -- just to name a few, and in no particular order -- Mike Green, Alexander Semin, Karl Alzner, Brooks Laich, John Carlson, Braden Holtby, T.J. Oshie, Evgeny Kuznetsov, and Justin Williams.

They drafted well, traded well, became perennial contenders, and turned in lots of damn fine seasons. Five times they had the best record in the Eastern Conference and four times the best record in the NHL. They were considered the front-runners for the Cup on more than one occasion, and a legit contender for it on almost every other occasion.

But those bastards known as the hockey gods kept knocking them over when the playoffs rolled around.

In a game of centimeters, the Caps always seemed to end up with their shots going a centimeter off target and the bounces deflecting the wrong way. No matter how good they were, once the playoffs rolled around they could never get past the second round.

My personal favorite post-season flameout by the Caps occurred in 2011, when they were the Eastern Conference's top seed but got swept by fifth-seeded Tampa Bay in the second round. But obviously that's my rooting interest kicking in.

Perhaps I could bring up the year before, 2010, when they had the NHL's best record only to get upset by Montreal in Round One. But even that doesn't seem central enough to the story, for the biggest truths concerning Washington post-season flameouts center inevitably around the franchise from the City of Bridges; namely, the Pittsburgh Penguins.

It has to be said that Washington's playoff struggles against Pittsburgh date all the way back to 1991, when they first met in the post-season and the Pens defeated the Caps in five games (in the second round, of course) en route to winning their first Stanley Cup. The following year they met again, this time in the first round, and the Caps were able to push it to a seventh game but the Pens prevailed and again went on to win the Cup. Between 1991 and 2001, they played seven different playoff series against each other with the Caps winning just one.

The most memorable game of that entire stretch (for me, at least) was Game Four of their 1996 series. Washington had won the first two games in Pittsburgh, followed by Pittsburgh taking Game Three in Washington, so Game Four was already on slate to be pivotal -- and then it wound up being epic, going all the way into the final minute of the fourth overtime before Pittsburgh's Petr Nedved potted the winner. The Pens went on to take the next two and won the series 4-2.

After 2001 the two franchises went eight years without facing each other in the playoffs, and it was during that interim that the Capitals drafted Ovechkin and the Penguins drafted Sidney Crosby. It was in 2009 (in the second round, of course) that they finally met again for another playoff donnybrook. The Caps were the #2 seed and the Pens #4, and Ovechkin had finished the season as the NHL's leading goal scorer with 56, which was 23 more than Crosby and 10 more than second-place Jeff Carter. In the total points race he beat out Crosby 110 to 103 (though they finished 2-3 behind Evgeni Malkin's 113).

Washington won the first two contests. Game Two was especially notable because Ovie and Crosby both had hat tricks, and Ovie's tally with 4:38 left proved to be the winner. But eventually the Penguins came back to win the series in seven games, three of which went to overtime, and then they went on to win the Cup.

The 2015-16 season ended with the Capitals having far and away the best record in the NHL and being the favorites to win it all. But they met the Penguins in the second round of the playoffs, and of course the Penguins beat them, and of course the Penguins went on to win the Cup.

Then the 2016-17 season also ended with the Capitals having the league's best record by a wide margin and being favored to win it all. But again they met the Penguins in the second round of the playoffs, and of course the Penguins beat them, and of course the Penguins went on to win the Cup.

That meant that Washington had played Pittsburgh in ten different post-season series and lost nine of them. It also meant that Pittsburgh had five Stanley Cups in franchise history while Washington had none, and that all five of Pittsburgh's Cups had come after eliminating Washington en route.

Between the end of that 2016-17 season and the beginning of the 2017-18 season that just concluded, a combination of salary cap concerns and age compelled the Caps to part ways with key veterans Karl Alzner, Justin Williams, Marcus Johansson, and Kevin Shattenkirk, just one year after they had parted ways with Nate Schmidt. Some people even began to wonder if it was worth it for the team to keep Ovechkin around, given his age and salary (never mind that he was but one season removed from a 50-goal campaign that earned him his sixth Rocket Richard Trophy).

The smart money guys claimed that the Caps had missed their chance, that they lacked championship mettle, that all those missed golden opportunities had caused so many problems to crop up between their ears that the problems could never be overcome.

But the Caps' players and coaches disagreed with the smart money guys, and resolved to make the 2017-18 season different than all the ones that came before.

To be continued...


Wednesday, June 6, 2018

D-Day

74 years ago this morning, human beings from the naval forces of eight Allied nations laid their lives on the line in ways most of us can hardly fathom. Two-thirds of them were from the U.S.U.K., and Canada.

Traveling in ships and amphibious vessels, they set sail from England in the pre-dawn hours of June 6, 1944, bound for the Normandy beaches of Nazi-controlled France. It was the first time since the 1600’s that any invading military had crossed the perilous waters of the English Channel, and as day broke tens of thousands of troops disembarked from their landing crafts and plunged into Hell on Earth.

Slogging first through waves and then through sand, they were sitting ducks for the Nazi gunners positioned on shore. Bullets rained on them amidst a cacophony of explosive reverberations. The men at the fronts of the landing crafts were the first ones to step on the beach, and they stepped onto it knowing they were likely to get shot. Each of them was acutely aware he might be entering the final seconds of his life.

Approximately 10,000 Allied men were killed or wounded that day. However, in bearing that brunt of brutality, those who were first on the scene helped clear the way for 100,000 of their fellow soldiers to reach shore and advance against the enemy, freeing occupied towns as they went. By the end of the month more than 800,000 men had done so, and the war’s momentum had swung in the Allies’ favor. Within a year the Nazis surrendered unconditionally.

In military parlance, the phrase “D-Day” refers to the first day of any operation, but in the public’s mind, it will always refer to the events on the beaches of Normandy. Now the men who braved the bullets on that distant shore are dying away at a rapid rate. Let us give them our thanks while they are still alive to hear it.

After all, we might never have tasted freedom if not for the valor of the soldiers of '44. Because of that, we must resolve to pass their story on to our children, so that they may pass it on to theirs, to preserve what Abraham Lincoln referred to as "the mystic chords" of our nation's memory.