It's An Ovie-ful Life: Part IV

As the curtain opens on Part IV, the Caps have once more finished last in the NHL in points, and the club has come to a crossroads. It’s May 2008, and the Caps are about to clean house in preparation for the summer’s activity. George McPhee – gone. Bruce Boudreau – gone. It seems that anyone not employed by the Caps in a skating capacity is being shown the door.

As the Caps are undertaking a front office remake, they are hit with a bombshell. Alexander Semin – arguably their most talented player – signs with the Kontinental Hockey League in Russia.

Rick Dudley is hired away from the Chicago Blackhawks, where he was assistant general manager, and assumes the role of general manager (his third tour of duty in the Southeast Division). He arrives too late to keep Semin from returning to Russia, and now he has to prepare for a draft that will be held in a matter of weeks. He has the benefit – and the pressure – of holding the first overall pick, as the Caps have won the lottery for the second time in three years. There is no mystery in this draft, though. Steven Stamkos is the odds-on choice as top prospect, and on draft day the Caps end whatever mystery there might be about whether they would trade the pick and announce Stamkos as the newest Capital.

There was still the matter of naming a head coach. Joel Quenneville, relieved of his duties by Colorado in May, is brought on board. That would not be the only move made by Washington. Gilbert Brule, the top Capitals pick of the 2005 draft, is sent to Edmonton for Robert Nilsson, an exchange of somewhat disappointing players. The Caps also swing a deal in free agency for former Ottawa forward Cory Stillman.

The 2008-2009 season opens in Atlanta, and the Thrashers should be a good barometer to gauge the state of the team entering the new season, for the Thrashers are coming off a disappointing season of their own (76 points, 13th in the East). The Thrashers pound the Caps in the opener, 7-4, but the Caps find their stride in October, finishing the month 5-3-1. It is their best October since the lockout.

What the Caps are finding is that they have an emerging defensive core. Cam Barker is a competent, if perhaps not an all-star defenseman. Mike Green is developing as an offensive defenseman. Erik Johnson (who did not stumble in a golf cart with St. Louis) is a number-one defenseman in the making. At forward, Stamkos – leaping straight to the NHL after being drafted in June – isn’t replacing Semin’s offense, but one can see why he was a number one overall pick. Turris, almost forgotten as the Caps’ top draft pick in 2007, takes his place with the big club. Stillman is a steadying veteran influence, if no longer a big offensive producer. They still have holes to fill, primarily among the forwards and at goaltender, but they make progress.

The Caps teeter along the fault line at .500 for most of the first half of the season, but an injury to Green and a flu bug going through the room take their toll. The Caps go 2-9-2 in January, and the team is left with only the faintest hope of making the playoffs. But they remain a difficult team to play against, a product of their improving defense, reminiscent of the kind of teams they iced in the 1980’s. They will finish the year 34-36-12 with 80 points, their best finish since the 2002-2003 season.

What they have not done, however, is significantly improve their popularity in Washington. They remain buried in the bottom third of attendance every year, with neither a consistent winning record nor a galvanizing personality bringing fans to the rink. What keeps them from being a perennial 30th ranked team in attendance is the fact that fans of other teams – either transplants living in Washington or fans that can make the trip – often turn Verizon Center into a “road game” for the Caps. The club cannot bid on high-end free agents, and even with a payroll closer to the floor than the ceiling each year the Caps can’t earn a profit. There are lingering questions hovering about this team as to whether it will remain the “Washington” Capitals. Although the club has made progress since the lockout, it has been measured in baby steps. In the summer of 2009 there is the broad realization that the Capitals are not yet a true playoff contender, and they are years – if ever – from being a Stanley Cup contender.

You, dear reader, may comb through this tale and find things you disagree with, or things that in your mind could not or would not have occurred. And neither are we making a case to turn Alex Ovechkin into a latter day George Bailey. There are a lot of ways to build a successful hockey team, and it often doesn’t require employing the best player in the league. Ovechkin is entering his fifth year, but has played for a team with only one playoff series win in that time. But that’s not the point. Ovechkin was drafted by the Caps in 2004, Crosby was drafted by Pittsburgh in that 2005 30-team lottery, and the Caps drafted Sasha Pokulok (the Rangers drafted Al Montoya in 2004… how’d that work out?).

Things are what they are, and all things considered, the Caps have done pretty well with the cards they were dealt in the draft the past half dozen years. Alex Ovechkin, Mike Green, Jeff Schultz, Nicklas Backstrom, Semyon Varlamov, Karl Alzner, John Carlson… even the most hardened Capitals fan would probably admit that this is a pretty good core of players. And that doesn’t include Alexander Semin, a 2002 draft pick. And there could be others on the way from those last half dozen drafts.

The Caps are not the favorite to win the Stanley Cup in 2009-2010; they might not even be “a” favorite. There are still holes on defense and uncertainty in goal that put them behind a Detroit or a Pittsburgh. But they do play an exciting brand of hockey, and they do sell out the house these days. It is unlikely any of this happens but for the bounce of a ping pong ball in 2004.

It's An Ovie-ful Life: Part III

As Part III of this tale opens, the Capitals have completed the 2006-2007 season in a way reminding what few fans they have left of the old saying about the Washington Senators that could be updated to reflect the Caps’ futility…

“Washington… first in war, first in peace, last in the NHL East.”

Although the Caps would tie the Flyers for the worst record in the NHL in the 2006-2007 season, the Chicago Blackhawks, who finished with the fifth-worst record and had only an 8.1 percent chance of winning the lottery, did just that. The Flyers, with fewer wins than the Caps, would pick second and the Caps third. The Caps weren’t waiting around, though, as things started happening shortly after the season ended. Coach Glen Hanlon was relieved of his duties on the day after the season ended. Without a marquee player to market, without a distinctive style to galvanize fan interest, the Capitals embarked on a search for a marquee coach – one with a record of success, if possible. On Memorial Day 2007, the Caps would announce the signing of Mike Keenan as head coach, Keenan’s eighth stop in an NHL coaching career that spanned more than two decades. He would bring with him a record of six divisional championships, but none since winning the Atlantic Division title and the Stanley Cup with the Rangers in 1994.

With once more having a high draft pick, the Caps turned their attention to their final evaluations of eligible amateur prospects, while the Ovechkin-led Penguins and Crosby-led Rangers were battling toward their first playoff meeting in the Eastern Conference final. The top three prospects in the 2007 draft were thought to be Kyle Turris (the CSB top-ranked prospect from Burnaby, BCHL), Patrick Kane (the top-ranked prospect at ISS from London, OHL), and James Van Riemsdyk (US U-18). While the anticipation on draft day centered on what the Blackhawks would do, there would be a mini-soap opera unfolding with the third pick. Rumors would swirl around the floor that the Capitals were looking to trade down from the number three spot, which raised more than a few eyebrows. As the Blackhawks and Flyers picked Kane and Van Riemsdyk promptly with their selections, the Caps used almost every second on the clock before making their pick – Kyle Turris. It didn’t look like a happy table, perhaps not for having missed a chance to trade down but rather for not agreeing on what to do with the pick.

July 1st is generally treated like Christmas Day for NHL fans – it is the first day of the unrestricted free agent signing period. But when you’re a club with a lot of missing pieces, a lot of pieces that don’t quite fit yet, and an empty pocketbook, you’d be thankful for coal in your stocking if you were a Caps fan. There wasn’t even that in this summer of free agency. The Caps were managing payroll and crossing their fingers that Barker, Brule, and Johnson were ready to stick and that some other youngsters could make an impact – Eric Fehr (a 2003 draftee), Alexander Semin (a 2002 draftee), Mike Green and Jeff Schultz (these two being the other first rounders in 2004). On paper, it would be a solid nucleus of prospects. But again, the twin problems would be the growing pains one had to endure with prospects of longer lead times than those such as Crosby or Ovechkin, and patience, a commodity in diminishing supply as the Caps entered the 2007-2008 season having averaged 58 standings points over the previous three seasons.

Patience was also not often a characteristic attributed to the Caps’ new bench boss, and it was tested early in the 2007-2008 season. Brule was not ready – two points in October – and by Hallowe’en was skating on the fourth line. By Thanksgiving, he’d be in Hershey. Barker didn’t make it that far – he started the season in Hershey. Johnson was pushed into more minutes and more responsibility than he was ready for, but he Caps had little choice. Green was contributing some in the offensive end, but his defensive play was an adventure, leading him to take a room in Keenan’s Chateau Bow-Wow. The Caps couldn’t stop anyone from scoring, and teams were loading up on defending Jason Arnott, whose contract had become quite an albatross for the club, and Alexander Semin, who was finding playing for Mike Keenan difficult.

The club was a mess.

Frustration on and off the ice was one commodity that was in large supply, and even an organization not given to a lot of disclosure couldn’t hide all of it. The Caps were showing no signs of improving their standing from recent years, and the club looked disinterested on the ice, the cruelest slap in the fans’ faces. A team with a long history of being a hard-working, lunch pail sort of club was going through the motions by the time the holidays rolled around. Finally, with the Caps mired in 30th place at the All Star break with a record of 14-29-7 and rumors of front office in-fighting, Keenan abruptly resigned.

The Caps looked to Hershey, where the Bears were once more among the leaders in the AHL. Head Coach Bruce Boudreau had led the Bears to a Calder Cup in 2006 and the Calder Cup final in 2007. He was on a pace for another trip deep into the playoffs with the Bears when the Caps called. Boudreau took over a demoralized club that was far out of the playoff mix and lacked the parts to do much damage to teams that were contending. The Caps went younger, calling up Brule to join the other youngsters.

Boudreau’s style, emphasizing an attacking strategy, appealed to the younger, more offensively-oriented players. But the club still suffered from uneven effort on defense and inconsistent goaltending. The mix made for a more entertaining brand of hockey, but not enough to move the needle appreciably in terms of improvement in the standings or tickets sold. The Caps were competitive until the end of February, playing .500 hockey, but couldn’t sustain the effort. They finished 12-14-6 in Boudreau’s portion of the season to complete the 2007-2008 campaign 26-43-13. 65 points would not be enough to get the Caps out of the NHL basement. Neither would it inspire enough fans to come to the rink to lift the Caps out of 30th place in the NHL in attendance.

It was another lost season with a summer that would suggest changes. That’s where we will pick up Part IV.

It's An Ovie-ful Life: Part II

In Part I of this fantasy (ok, nightmare), we took a look at what happened as a result of two rounds of ping-pong ball sessions, the Caps missing out on the top pick in 2004 and the chance to pick Alex Ovechkin, and missing out on the 2005 pick and with it, Sidney Crosby. The Caps, in our tale, end up selecting Cam Barker and Gilbert Brule with their top draft picks in 2004 and 2005. It is there where we pick up the story…

The first year out of the lockout is a chance for hockey to reintroduce itself to fans with a lot of pent up emotion over what transpired over the past 12 months and a lot of pent up desire to see live NHL hockey once more. New rules and exciting new players in Alex Ovechkin (in Pittsburgh?) and Sidney Crosby (with the Rangers?) lend an air of anticipation to the opening of the season.

But not in Washington.

The Caps open their season against the Columbus Blue Jackets with a roster that has the possibility of being historically bad. First round draft picks of the past two years – Cam Barker and Gilbert Brule – are still toiling for their junior clubs. Meanwhile, the Caps are icing a top line on opening night of Dainius Zubrus, Andrew Cassels, and Jeff Friesen, a trio that combined had a total of 36 goals in the season before the lockout. Not that anyone cared – the Verizon Center stands were barely half-full for an opening night. The Columbus Blue Jackets – a team coming off a 62-point season in the season before the lockout – would shut out the Caps on their own ice to open the season.

Amazingly, it would get worse from there. The Caps would struggle mightily to score goals and would give them up in bushels. And, they would say “good-bye” to an icon. Olaf Kolzig, who in the real world of things would re-sign with the Capitals on February 11, 2006, was instead traded to the Colorado Avalanche (the careful reader will note that Colorado did trade for a goaltender late in the 2005-2006 season: Jose Theodore). The Capitals, with a prospect pool of goalies that included Daren Machesney and Maxime Daigneualt (Maxime Ouellet having been traded late in 2005 to Vancouver), the Caps took 23-year old rookie goaltender Peter Budaj in return. It would not be the only trade the Caps would make as they tried to position themselves for draft picks and prospects. Jeff Halpern and Dainius Zubrus were sent off for mid-round draft picks.

The Caps limped home with a 21-49-12 record, worst in the league and their worst season since 1977-1978. In their last home game – Fan Appreciation Day against the Atlanta Thrashers – the “official” attendance was 14,000. Perhaps two-thirds of that number made it to the rink. It was, to say the least, a dismal season, one made worse in the knowledge that Alex Ovechkin would lead the Penguins to two romps in a Penguin-fan dominated Verizon Center (the only sellouts of the season) and score four goals in one of the games. And meanwhile, in New York, Sidney Crosby was finishing third in scoring, winning the Calder Trophy, and leading the Rangers to the Eastern Conference Final before falling to the Ottawa Senators.

If there was a silver lining in this thunder cloud, it was that the Capitals won the lottery and with it the rights to pick first in the 2006 entry draft. The 2006 draft class had a group of five skaters that stood above the rest of the class. Erik Johnson (generally thought to be at the head of the 2006 class), Jonathan Toews, Phil Kessel, Jordan Staal, and Nicklas Backstrom comprised the group. The Capitals flirted with the idea of selecting Staal, the brother of Carolina’s Eric, but selected Johnson.

In free agency, the Capitals had to be a player to be able to reach the salary floor for the 2006-2007 season. The trouble was that the 2006 free agent class was generally a comparatively weak one. The Capitals signed Jason Arnott from Dallas to a five-year, $25 million contract, outbidding the Nashville Predators in the process, in addition to a few minor signings.

The 2006-2007 season was not so much about Arnott and his big contract, but the players the Caps were developing – Cam Barker, Gilbert Brule, and Erik Johnson being the important elements. Barker would split time roughly equally between Washington and the Hershey Bears. Brule would the entire year in Washington, but would struggle to make a positive impression, finishing the year with less than 20 points. Johnson would spend his year at the University of Minnesota, where the Gophers would make it all the way to the NCAA Western Regional before falling to North Dakota.

Johnson had a much better year than the Caps had, although the Caps did improve on the previous season. With a 25-47-10 record and 60 points, they would tie the Flyers for last in the league. Where the Caps would again struggle was at the gate. They would finish 29th in the league in attendance, but even this was deceptive. On most nights Verizon Center was barely half full, if that, and often those crowds were predominantly followers of the visiting teams. Despite the “cost certainty” of the collective bargaining agreement and circuit breakers to keep small market and struggling teams afloat, red ink was gushing across the Caps’ balance sheets as if coming out of a fire hose.

There were youngsters coming through the system, and the temptation was to bring them along faster than a more successful team might have. The question was coming into focus – could the Caps afford to be patient? Without a stable gate, with a singular lack of success on the ice, without a marquee presence, the team and the league were growing concerned over the prospects for hockey in Washington in the long term. That is where we will pick it up in Part III.

It's An Ovie-ful Life: Part I

Over at Kukla’s Korner the other day, Tony at The Confluence penned a piece pondering the notion of whether the Penguins would still be in Pittsburgh had a certain ping pong ball not dropped a certain way in the 2005 NHL draft lottery.

Well, it got us to thinking, what if the ping pong ball had gone another way in 2004? What if, instead of coming up “Capitals,” it came up “Blackhawks,” or worse…”Penguins?” With respect to the latter we, too, will have recurring nightmares of a number “8” jersey in black and Vegas gold. But for our purposes here, we’ll take a stroll through Bedford Falls and contemplate life with the Capitals had Alex Ovechkin not been drafted.

The Capitals would have drafted third in that 2004 draft, by virtue of their having finished with the third worst record in the league, regardless of whether the Blackhawks or Penguins won the lottery. Assuming that both Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin would have gone 1-2 in that draft, just as they did in the real-life version of the story, the Capitals would have been left with a second-tier selection of talented, but not generational franchise players.

Given the fact that in five of the previous six drafts the Capitals selected their first pick from the Western Hockey League in Canadian juniors, you would have to think it likely, if not a certainty, that the Caps would go out west once more. The consensus third-ranked prospect in that draft was Cam Barker, a defenseman with the Medicine Hat Tigers. However, the Caps had indifferent success in picking defensemen in years leading up to the 2004 draft. In the previous five drafts, the Caps selected 13 defensemen, only one of whom – Steve Eminger – gave much hope, at least to Caps fans, of one day being a contributing NHL player (Johnny Oduya, selected in the seventh round in 2001 went on to skate a regular turn for the New Jersey Devils). Two of those 13 defensemen – Nolan Yonkman and Ross Lupsachuk – had already been traded away in the Jaromir Jagr deal in 2001. Picking Barker would have made sense and would have been consistent with the Caps’ behavior to date.

So… Cam Barker is the number three pick selected. Where does the club go from there? Well, there was still the 2004-2005 lockout, but there a 2005 draft, too. To remind folks, the rules set forth for the lottery to assign the draft order were simple (if their logic wasn’t). First, each team started with three ping pong balls and lost one for each playoff appearance in the previous three years but only to a maximum of two, assuring each team will have at least one ball. Under this rule, the Caps would have lost one ball, having participated in the 2003 playoffs. Second, teams that had the first overall pick in each of the last four drafts also lost a ball. Since the Caps didn’t have a first overall pick (remember, they didn’t win the 2004 lottery in this tale), they would have had two balls (neat how that works out).

There were 10 clubs that had two balls in the 2005 draft lottery. Pittsburgh could have lost one to be left with two had they won the 2004 lottery. Had Chicago won the lottery, they would have lost one to be left with one ball. But let’s not complicate things any further. Of the ten teams with two balls, Anaheim managed to end up selecting second, Carolina third, and Minnesota fourth, so despite the rather long odds of a two-ball club getting the first overall pick (4.17 percent chance), there were still the opportunities to select early (even though the grand prize – Sidney Crosby – would be gone).

For the sake of argument, let’s assume the Caps had the best possible luck – yes, we know…that never happens for the Caps, but humor me. They would get the second pick. When the Ducks picked second, they selected Bobby Ryan (of the Owen Sound Attack in the Ontario Hockey League), but he was not the consensus number two prospect. Both Central Scouting and ISS, for example, had Benoit Pouliot (Sudbury, OHL) as their number two-ranked prospect.

From the Caps perspective, would they go for an OHL forward (the Caps hadn’t drafted an OHL forward since picking Charlie Stephens in the second round in 1999)? Would they go for defenseman Jack Johnson (NTDP Under-18)? Would they go west again and draft Gilbert Brule (Vancouver, WHL)? The Caps had that whole WHL history and hadn’t yet shown an inclination to draft out of US programs by that time, at least with high picks. But was Johnson too good to pass up? Would they fall back on what they knew and pick Brule? Would they go off the board? While the Caps did, in fact go off the board in 2005 – off the reservation, in fact – selecting Sasha Pokulok at 14, we have a suspicion they would have played safe – “safe” meaning repeating their past behavior – and picked Brule.

Keep in mind, though, this was the best possible outcome based on the Caps picking second, instead of the club that did, the Anaheim Ducks. Of the ten teams that had two ping pong balls in the 2005 draft, the team with the lowest pick was Calgary, picking 26th. If you’re wondering who they picked, it was Matt Pelech.

So, as we come out of the lockout year into the light of the 2005-2006 season, the Capitals would not have Alex Ovechkin and Sasha Pokulok to show for their top draft picks in 2004 and 2005, but rather Cam Barker and Gilbert Brule. It is there where we will pick up the story in the next installment.