Opinion

Caps continue quest for elusive Stanley Cup

Eric McErlain Sports Blogger
Font Size:

Like most Septembers in Washington, D.C., the attention of local sports fans is primarily focused on the Washington Redskins. But despite the fact that Dan Snyder’s team has started the season with two consecutive victories, the team in town that’s closest to a championship is the Washington Capitals of the National Hockey League.

Though the regular season won’t start until October, training camp for the Caps opened last Saturday morning. You really ought to get out to see them sometime. That is, if you can find a ticket.

It wasn’t all that long ago that the team’s home, the Verizon Center, looked more like a tomb than an arena on game nights. But now, buoyed by a young lineup that’s catapulted the team to the top of the standings in recent seasons, the franchise can boast that it’s sold out 106 consecutive home games. That’s an achievement that the team’s original owner, the late Abe Pollin, could have hardly dreamed of when the team played deep in the Maryland suburbs at the late and unlamented Capital Centre.

On the ice however, the ultimate prize, the Stanley Cup, remains stubbornly elusive. It’s a failure that isn’t attributable to a lack of trying.

Since purchasing the team in 1999, Caps owner Ted Leonsis has pursued two distinct paths to on-ice success.

First, there was the easy way, trying to replace an aging core of players with high-priced free agents. That strategy was put in place in 2001, when Leonsis overruled his hockey people, acquired mercurial superstar Jaromir Jagr and proceeded to give him one of the richest contracts in NHL history.

While that trade and incredible contract electrified the city’s hockey fans for a time, spending all of those dollars didn’t produce enough victories. Faced with an expensive failure, Leonsis gave the go-ahead to begin the breakup of the team during the 2003-04 season, less than three years after the Jagr trade. The team crashed to the bottom of the standings and the fans stopped coming.

But as painful as that season was, it represented the beginning of the team’s re-birth. The players traded away helped yield draft picks and prospects that now form the core of the lineup. And the drop in the standings meant climbing back to the top of the heap when it came time to draft new players. As fate and luck would have it, the Caps had the first pick in their hip pocket when Alex Ovechkin, a young Russian winger with more drive in his pinky than Jagr has in his whole body, was available in the 2004 draft.

Since then, the trajectory for the team has pointed nowhere but up. Ovechkin was a revelation from the moment he stepped on the ice for his first game in the league, and it soon became apparent that there was more than enough young talent in the rest of the lineup to help put the puck in the net and provide a very entertaining night out on the town. Mix in the addition of minor league lifer and genuine character Bruce Boudreau as the team’s head coach, and the team returned to the playoffs in the spring of 2008.

It was then that the franchise learned that it was in for another hard lesson, that victories in the regular season are not necessarily predictive of success in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. So while Boudreau has been able to lead the team to four consecutive appearances in the postseason, the team has only advanced past the first round twice.

Each playoff exit has proven to be more painful than the last.

    • In 2008, the team was eliminated on home ice in overtime of a seventh game against the hated Philadelphia Flyers.
    • In 2009, the team dropped a seventh game on home ice again, this time in a blowout to Sidney Crosby and the eventual Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins.
    • In 2010, the team was heavily favored to roll over the Montreal Canadiens in the first round of the playoffs. After taking a 3-1 series lead, the team lost three straight and dropped the series in one of the biggest upsets in recent NHL history. Once again, the defeat was capped with a game seven loss at home.
    • 2011 looked a little brighter after the Caps dispatched the New York Rangers in the first round, but the wheels couldn’t have come off the bus fast enough as the Caps were promptly swept in the second round by the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Each failure has been followed by more tinkering to the lineup, and there’s plenty of reasons to believe that the changes made this offseason will help put them over the top. The team has added more grit on the wings (Joel Ward and Troy Brouwer) and veteran savvy (defenseman Roman Hamrlik and center Jeff Halpern, a native of Potomac, Maryland, in his second stint with the team).

But perhaps most important of all was the surprising addition of elite goalie Tomas Vokoun. A casualty of the NHL’s salary cap, Vokoun was left without a team to play for when the Florida Panthers declined to re-sign him to another multi-year deal. Enter Caps general manager George McPhee, who was able to secure Vokoun at the bargain price of just $1.5 million for this upcoming season. Finding a goalie like Vokoun who can steal games on nights when the rest of the team is not playing its best hockey was an incredible coup.

Unfortunately, NHL championships are not won in June, July and August. And they’re not won between October and April either, as this team can surely attest. So enjoy the Caps’ regular season for what it is — a preview of the main event that comes every spring. And keep your fingers crossed. At this point, that’s the only thing that’s really left to do.

Eric McErlain blogs at Off Wing Opinion, a Forbes “Best of the Web” winner. In 2006 he wrote a “bloggers bill of rights” to help integrate bloggers into the Washington Capitals’ press box. Eric has also written for Deadspin, NBC Sports and the Sporting News, and covers sports television for The TV News. Follow Eric on Twitter.

PREMIUM ARTICLE: Subscribe To Keep Reading

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!

Sign Up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
Sign up

By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use

You're signed up!
BENEFITS READERS PASS PATRIOTS FOUNDERS
Daily and Breaking Newsletters
Daily Caller Shows
Ad Free Experience
Exclusive Articles
Custom Newsletters
Editor Daily Rundown
Behind The Scenes Coverage
Award Winning Documentaries
Patriot War Room
Patriot Live Chat
Exclusive Events
Gold Membership Card
Tucker Mug

What does Founders Club include?

Tucker Mug and Membership Card
Founders

Readers,

Instead of sucking up to the political and corporate powers that dominate America, The Daily Caller is fighting for you — our readers. We humbly ask you to consider joining us in this fight.

Now that millions of readers are rejecting the increasingly biased and even corrupt corporate media and joining us daily, there are powerful forces lined up to stop us: the old guard of the news media hopes to marginalize us; the big corporate ad agencies want to deprive us of revenue and put us out of business; senators threaten to have our reporters arrested for asking simple questions; the big tech platforms want to limit our ability to communicate with you; and the political party establishments feel threatened by our independence.

We don't complain -- we can't stand complainers -- but we do call it how we see it. We have a fight on our hands, and it's intense. We need your help to smash through the big tech, big media and big government blockade.

We're the insurgent outsiders for a reason: our deep-dive investigations hold the powerful to account. Our original videos undermine their narratives on a daily basis. Even our insistence on having fun infuriates them -- because we won’t bend the knee to political correctness.

One reason we stand apart is because we are not afraid to say we love America. We love her with every fiber of our being, and we think she's worth saving from today’s craziness.

Help us save her.

A second reason we stand out is the sheer number of honest responsible reporters we have helped train. We have trained so many solid reporters that they now hold prominent positions at publications across the political spectrum. Hear a rare reasonable voice at a place like CNN? There’s a good chance they were trained at Daily Caller. Same goes for the numerous Daily Caller alumni dominating the news coverage at outlets such as Fox News, Newsmax, Daily Wire and many others.

Simply put, America needs solid reporters fighting to tell the truth or we will never have honest elections or a fair system. We are working tirelessly to make that happen and we are making a difference.

Since 2010, The Daily Caller has grown immensely. We're in the halls of Congress. We're in the Oval Office. And we're in up to 20 million homes every single month. That's 20 million Americans like you who are impossible to ignore.

We can overcome the forces lined up against all of us. This is an important mission but we can’t do it unless you — the everyday Americans forgotten by the establishment — have our back.

Please consider becoming a Daily Caller Patriot today, and help us keep doing work that holds politicians, corporations and other leaders accountable. Help us thumb our noses at political correctness. Help us train a new generation of news reporters who will actually tell the truth. And help us remind Americans everywhere that there are millions of us who remain clear-eyed about our country's greatness.

In return for membership, Daily Caller Patriots will be able to read The Daily Caller without any of the ads that we have long used to support our mission. We know the ads drive you crazy. They drive us crazy too. But we need revenue to keep the fight going. If you join us, we will cut out the ads for you and put every Lincoln-headed cent we earn into amplifying our voice, training even more solid reporters, and giving you the ad-free experience and lightning fast website you deserve.

Patriots will also be eligible for Patriots Only content, newsletters, chats and live events with our reporters and editors. It's simple: welcome us into your lives, and we'll welcome you into ours.

We can save America together.

Become a Daily Caller Patriot today.

Signature

Neil Patel