"The Washington Capitals’ window has closed. Year after year the Caps said, as the Nats are now saying for the third straight year, we have the talent, we have what it takes, right here in this room, to play for a championship. Our window of opportunity is wide open.
Right up until it isn’t."
Thomas Boswell, the renowned columnist for the Washington
Post, authored those words in a column about the Washington Nationals baseball
team on Saturday. It was a warning to
the Nationals and their fans that windows of opportunity that open for a professional
sports team eventually close, that the team chock full of talent and expectations
today can turn into, as he put it, “a decent back-in-the-pack team.”
While Boswell’s subject is the Nationals, we are left to
wonder if the basis for his warning, that the window of opportunity for the
Caps has closed, has merit.
Let us begin by saying, he’s right. The Caps are no longer, as Boswell said, one of six or eight
teams that is in Stanley Cup debates.
They are just a decent back-in-the-pack team, and sometimes that
description seems charitable. They are,
at this stage of their evolution depending on “a puncher’s chance to find a hot
goalie in the playoffs, get their lines right, fall into a couple of
advantageous early-round matchups.” In other words, to rely on the fool’s
crutch, that “anything can happen” once you get to the playoffs.
If they get there at all.
Getting to the playoffs this season is not what concerns us
about Boswell’s argument. It is whether
this club has essentially wasted the blessings of a ping-pong ball falling into
their lap to secure the rights to pick first in the 2004 entry draft, a pick
they used to select Alex Ovechkin, who has since been the face and the
cornerstone of the franchise.
The best we can say about that is, “it depends.” The team, as currently constituted, is not
going to win a Stanley Cup. It just isn’t,
the deluded ramblings of early-season prognosticators notwithstanding. We could go into the why’s and the how’s, but
that is a conversation for another day. We are concerned with the question of whether
the window of opportunity is closed.
Call it the “Home Depot Theory” of team evolution, but if we
are going to use the “window” analogy to describe a team’s evolution, then we
need to acknowledge that a structure generally has more than one window. And perhaps as one window closes, another
becomes available.
The “window” of which we might speak of these Capitals
opened when that ping-pong ball came up “Capitals” in 2004. That season the Caps drafted Alex Ovechkin, a
generational talent. It also happened to
be the season in which they drafted defenseman Mike Green, another young talent
around which the Capitals could rebuild in addition to a raw natural talent
that the club drafted in 2002 – Alexander Semin.
After a 2005 league-wide lotto-draft in which the still bottom-rung
Capitals were drafting in the middle of the pack, a draft that would eventually
yield no player who would ever dress for the Caps, Washington took advantage of
another lottery draft slot and selected Nicklas Backstrom with the
fifth-overall pick in 2006. The club also
would pick a pair of goalies – Semyon Varlamov and Michal Neuvirth – to compete
to become the successor to franchise icon Olaf Kolzig.
The Caps had their core, and the “window of opportunity” was
about to open. The first opportunity they
had to climb through it was in 2008, following a coaching change and a furious
comeback from being dead last in the Eastern Conference at one point in the
season. However, the Caps, with their “young
guns” of Ovechkin, Backstrom, Semin, and Green, were eliminated from their
unanticipated and unlikely Stanley Cup playoff appearance by the Philadelphia
Flyers, who won a Game 7 in overtime.
That appearance would start a string of six seasons in which
the Caps would reach the post-season Stanley Cup tournament, a string that is
current, but in jeopardy. That six-year
run of post-season appearances constitute the “window of opportunity” for this
generation of Caps to bring a championship to Washington, an achievement no
local major professional sports organization has been able to accomplish since
the Washington Redskins won a Super Bowl title in 1992.
Alas, not only has this edition of the Capitals not won a
championship, they have not advanced to a conference final and have won a grand
total of three playoff series. The
losses have been agonizing. In the six
years in which the Caps appeared in the playoffs they were eliminated in a Game
7 five times, four times at home.
This season, the Capitals are in a fight for their playoff
lives. They are in ninth place in a race
in which only eight teams make the playoffs, a tie-breaker behind the Detroit
Red Wings, with whom they are tied in standings points, for a wild card
spot. It is part of what has been a
long, slow decline since the Capitals set a franchise record (and a record for
a non-original six team) 121 standings points and won a Presidents Trophy in
2009-2010. Since that 54-win season the
club has seen its win totals drop to 48 to 42 to a pro-rated 46 (they won 27
times in 48 games in the abbreviated 2012-2013 season) to what is a pace for 38
wins this season.
The window barely makes a sound when it closes, apparently.
Do the Caps have another window to open, though? Every team turns over its personnel. The annual entry draft, trades, free agent
signings, waiver claims, all are means for a club to remake itself over
time. The flip side is that players and
personalities that we become used to, familiar with, and even attached to move
on. For the Caps, the “young guns” that
made their appearance in 2007-2008 are a thing of the past. Alexander Semin has moved on to
Carolina. Alex Ovechkin and Mike Green
are not “young guns,” they are engaged to be married. Nicklas Backstrom is a father. Time goes on.
Life’s march of time and responsibilities aside, we are left
to consider if there is another window for the Caps to open. Let’s go back in time to consider if this is
even reasonable. First, remember what
the Capitals were before they drafted Alex Ovechkin – awful. Having gambled on splashy trades (well, one),
free agents, and aging stars to bring a
Cup to Washington, the gamble failed, and the team sold off its pricey assets
for picks and prospects. The result was
a team that won just 23 games in the 2003-2004 season, and even after drafting
Alex Ovechkin in 2004 winning only 29 games in 2005-2006 and 28 games in
2006-2007. In those years the Caps would
develop Ovechkin, to whom would be added Green, Semin, and Backstrom to form
the core that would make the playoffs in 2007-2008.
Dial the Wayback Machine to 1983. The Detroit Red Wings, a proud franchise having
won seven Stanley Cups, had just finished a five-year run in which they failed
to win as many as 25 games. They missed
the playoffs for the 12th time in 13 seasons, over which time they
went through a dozen coaches. They were
a mess.
They also had the fourth overall pick in the 1983
draft. The Wings were not unfamiliar with
high round draft picks, having picked in the top five four times in the
previous eight drafts. In 1983, though,
they hit the jackpot. They selected
Steve Yzerman, a center with the Peterborough Petes who racked up 91 points in
56 games in the 1982-1983 season. Given
the state of the Wings and their lack of talent, Yzerman was thrust into the
lineup right away to sink or swim. For
him, the rest was history.
We are more concerned with what happened later. Despite Yzerman’s presence the Red Wings
still struggled, enough to realize top-ten draft picks in each of the next
three drafts, including an number one overall pick in 1986 (Joe Murphy). The infusion of talent had an effect. Yzerman piled up points. Recording 229 goals
and 565 points over his first six seasons, culminating in a 65-goal/155-point
finish to his sixth season in 1988-1989.
The Red Wings made the playoffs five times in those six seasons, but
they advanced past the first round only twice, due in part to the fact that
those other top-ten picks did not develop as one might have expected top-ten
picks to do, and Yzerman was perhaps too enamored of scoring and not doing the
other things great players and great teams do to win championships.
Yzerman continued to produce at a 50-plus goal/100-plus
point pace into the early 1990’s, but by the time he completed his tenth season
in 1992-1993 (a 58-goal/137-point season), Yzerman was the only member of the
1983-1984 team (his rookie season) left.
He had eight playoff appearances to show for it, but five times in those
eight appearances his team was eliminated in the first round.
You would think that any “window” that the Red Wings might
have had with one of the most prolific scorers of his era was closing. There were other things going on,
though. There was the draft. Having top-ten draft picks was no guarantee
of success, but finding gold in later rounds would pay off. In 1989 the Red Wings went to Europe for
their third and fourth round picks, taking a defenseman from Sweden in the
third round and a forward from Russia in the fourth. The next season they would find another
Russian forward in the third round. In
1991 they took a Canadian forward in the first round with the tenth-overall
pick and a goalie in the third round, the first time the Red Wings took a
goalie that high in the draft in ten years.
The Red Wings still had Yzerman, but now they also had
Nicklas Lidstrom, Sergei Fedorov, Vyacheslav Kozlov, Martin Lapointe, and Chris
Osgood. By 1993-1994 all six would play
important roles for the club for their new coach, Scotty Bowman. By 1995, all of them would reach the Stanley
Cup finals, and by 1997 they would win it all.
What you have just read might be considered a bit
simplistic. It was not just these six
players, in addition to Yzerman, that took the Red Wings to a Cup in 1997, and
Hall of Fame coaches do not drop out of trees into the laps of NHL teams. However, what we can – and do – argue is that
a window closing does not preclude another from opening, if managed well.
For the Washington Capitals, the window that opened in
2007-2008 is most assuredly closing. The
task at hand is to find another window to open.
Will that window provide entry for the likes of Evgeny Kuznetsov, Tom
Wilson, Andre Burakowsky, Riley Barber, or other prospects? Will this coaching staff, or perhaps another,
find the key to unlock the talents of the old guard of Ovechkin, Backstrom, and
Green, and find a way to mesh them with the next generation of Capitals?
That the Red Wings found a way to do it is not meant to
serve as a template, it is not the sort of thing that can be replicated in an on-demand basis. It is only as a example that it can – and does – happen. But it is rare to find those elements and
have them come together just so to make a collection of pieces a championship
whole. It might not be that a single
generation of talent takes a club to the highest level. Perhaps it is another generation that takes
its place in the constant evolution of a franchise to build on what that first
generation raised from the rubble of mediocrity when they were younger.
Boswell says what perhaps a lot of Caps fans feel, that “if
the Caps had made horrid mistakes, the pain of watching them now as they
struggle to be average would not be so annoying and poignant. But they didn’t.
Their exceptionality just slipped away as the years sped past.”
The Red Wings became exceptional because their success was
unexceptional. It became their standard,
a product of a long series of decisions and actions – some the product of good
fortune, some unfortunate, some painstakingly taken with the longer view in
mind.
In the end, the Caps might have been exceptional, and if these last six years are, in fact, the exception, perhaps that
means that their standard is something less or unachievable in the manner the team is organized.
It should not be. But to raise
that standard, they need to find – or make – another window.
