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 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.
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.
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 thatmany 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 Canadiansand 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.
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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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
* * * * *
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
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.
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