When your alumni game features less than one former player for each year your franchise has played, and none of them play goalie, something might be wrong. The 2006-2007 season was a chance for the Washington Capitals to take a long, sometimes painful look at the prospects it has drafted and traded for in recent years. Over the season, the team discovered that these young players were generally young, inexperienced and insecure. With the right coaching, though, they were able to lose when they had to.

After Saturday's sold out shutout loss to Buffalo, the Caps fell back to 27th place in the 30 team NHL. This gives them a chance to pick first, fourth or fifth in the NHL's draft lottery. The drawing is tomorrow at noon. We'd like to begin a two part series examining some of the brilliant ways they reached this lofty achievement. For today, we'll focus on the Capitals' treatment of Alexander Semin, free agent acquisition strategy, and goaltending evaluation.

The Old Switcheroo
When the Capitals began the 2006-07 season with an even record due to the success of then-league-leading scorer Alexander Semin, the organization had to ask itself some important questions. First: how big of a contract would Semin demand when he became a free agent in the summer of 2008? Second: could they build for the future around a player they had already sued? Third: if Semin led the league in scoring, would the Caps get full value out of all the publicity they had invested in Alex Ovechkin?

Photograph of Caps alumni game by Eli Resnick

Balking at the answers to these questions, the Capitals benched Semin's center, Kris Beech, and replaced him with rookie Jakub Klepis. Then, when Semin figured out how to play with Klepis, they switched back. This continued all year, and when Semin got to the point where he remembered Beech and Klepis, they put him on lines with Dainius Zubrus, Boyd Gordon, Brian Sutherby, Brooks Laich and Jiri Novotny instead. The "plan" worked. Semin finished the season thirteenth in the NHL in goals and thirty-eighth in points. More than half of his points came on the power play, where he hardly ever shared the ice with either Beech or Klepis.

Beech and Klepis are both capable centers. They were each drafted in the first half of a first round, and they've each been traded for multi-million dollar players (Jagr, Witt and Grier). Both helped lead Hershey to the Calder Cup championship last spring, with Beech scoring more points, but Klepis garnering the Cup-winning goal. The constant readjustment to new linemates kept either of them from achieving their full potential or developing any sort of chemistry with Semin this year. Klepis also may have been too young for so much playing time in the NHL. Hopefully this season will not stunt his development.

Long Term Investment
Last summer, the Caps signed free-agent defenseman Brian Pothier to a four-year, ten million dollar contract. Pothier had played well for years in the minor leagues and had done pretty well in his first two full seasons with the NHL's Ottawa Senators. The Caps wanted to model their club on Ottawa's success, so hiring away any Senator they could get looked like a good idea--even if they had to outbid other teams by four million dollars to do so. General Manager George McPhee explained that within four years, when Pothier had picked up enough experience to be a solid offensive defenseman, this contract would look like a steal.

Unfortunately, the first year has been rougher than expected. The Capitals couldn't bring themselves to leave their second-highest paid player on the bench, but Pothier, despite playing in 72 games, averaging 23 minutes per game, and receiving copious power play time, scored only three goals all season.

When Pothier was briefly injured, the Caps called up Lawrence Nycholat from their farm team in Hershey. The three-time AHL all star scored two goals in just eighteen games while providing a stronger physical presence and making better passes than the player he replaced. Nycholat would have permanently replaced Pothier if not for contractual considerations.

Instead, when everyone was healthy, Nycholat had to be traded to the highest bidder. The Ottawa Senators coincidentally had an opening at left bench, and traded a sixth round pick for Nycholat. The better defenseman has since played one game with the model franchise, and the worse player will earn $7.5 million over the next three years to show the Caps how those Senators do it. The lesson should be fairly clear.

No Confidence Man
Goaltending is all about confidence. In 2004, when the Capitals dove into lottery position to draft Ovechkin, they rode the shattered nerves of goalie Matt Yeats. Yeats never recovered his game after losing the NCAA championship, and was fired from the Atlantic City Boardwalk Bullies of the East Coast Hockey League (where farm teams have their farm teams). Shortly thereafter, the Capitals signed him for approximately fifty thousand dollars. Then they traded away every proven player they had (and one they didn't even have yet) for draft picks and prospects. Yeats filled in admirably for injured goalies Olaf Kolzig and Jean Sebastien Charpentier, losing his first three decisions before beating Pittsburgh (who were so dedicated to finishing in last place that they didn't score on a five minute power play in the third period), and being benched in favor of the badly injured Kolzig. With Ovechkin in a Caps sweater, the rest is history.

Last autumn the Caps claimed cheap backup goaltender Brent "BJ" Johnson off waivers from Vancouver. Waivers is the sports equivalent of putting your carrot sticks "up for grabs." Johnson had several good years in St. Louis, who had two of the league's ten best defensemen in Chris Pronger and Al MacInnis preventing anybody from shooting at him. After the Blues gave up on Johnson, he helped the Coyotes to a bottom-five finish, and then the Canucks gave up on him, too, after just one training camp. This year, on January 12th, with Johnson putting up a pathetic 4-6-2 record in limited action, the Caps signed him to a surprising two year contract extension.

Starting the very next day, Johnson lost sixteen of his next seventeen games in regulation. The NHL currently awards two standings points for a win, one point for an overtime loss, one point for a shootout loss and no points for a regulation loss. Johnson, in seventeen starts, for a team that had picked up about one point per game thus far, picked up only two of thirty-four available points. He declined from .833 standings points per game before signing his new contract to .058 starting immediately after and continuing until the Caps were assured of a bottom five finish. With the lottery all but in the bag, Johnson turned in a solid effort, staying in good position between the puck and the net to win his last start of the season on the road against the Southeast division champion Atlanta Thrashers (who took the night off, just like division rivals Florida and Tampa before them, to avoid helping the Caps win another lottery). We're certainly the last ones to suggest a conspiracy, and we have no idea what verbal agreements might have accompanied BJ's contract negotiations, but when the puck comes toward Johnson's right shoulder in the video of those losses, the camera clearly shows the goalie skating back and to the left.