Caps Review 2: Season in the Cat Box
Today, with great pride and pleasure, we bring you the second and final part in our season review of the tragedy known as the 2006-07 Washington Capitals. Yesterday we looked at the team's sticky relationship with elite offensive star Alexander Semin, their odd choice of a ten million dollar free agent with almost no NHL experience and the team's pattern of hiring capable but downtrodden goaltenders to help them plummet through the standings into the league's hallowed draft lottery.
Today at noon the Capitals had a slight chance of winning the first overall pick. Early rumor says the Hawks won, but the actual results will be announced on Canadian national television at four p.m., and gradually leaked stateside after that. Until then, the Caps' future is like a cat in a box. If they don't win the drawing, they'll still pick fourth or fifth in the draft this summer.
Tomorrow we'll analyze the team's reaction to the lottery, and break down their plans for the summer. For today, we'd like to look at three more ways the Capitals managed to take a team that started out okay and lose enough games to pull in another top draft pick. First we'll examine a confrontation with the ghosts of trades past. Next we'll look at a novel way of shuffling the lineup. Finally we'll look at the effect of all this losing on the cornerstone of the organization.
Leaving the Past Behind
One of the trades that Caps fans have long wanted to have back was the deal that sent fan favorite Richard Zednik to Montreal and brought back late bloomer Dainius Zubrus. When Zubrus played with Alex Ovechkin, he broke his personal scoring records, but the numbers weren't enough to erase the heartache left by the trade. Zednik, in addition to skating amazingly fast, used to bleach and spike his hair, and DC101 would give you a free ticket to some games if you gave yourself the same haircut. For many fans, it was love. Last summer in D.C., dreams came true. Zednik complained that Montreal didn't give him enough ice time, and the Canadiens traded the whining winger back to the Caps for only a third round draft pick. For hockey or fashion reasons, it was a great deal.
This season, playing with Alex Ovechkin for most of the year, Zubrus again broke his personal records for goals, assists and points, while still playing defensively sound hockey. This was enough to earn priase from coaches, but not enough for many fans, who pointed out that a great player, on a line with Ovechkin, should have scored twice as many points. Zednik, on the other hand, took a long time to click on any line, and eventually ended up working third line duties, much as he had complained about in Montreal.
At the 2007 trade dealine, when the Caps still had a chance (though not a very good chance) of making the playoffs, the team got rid of both Zednik and Zubrus. The trades that sent them away brought back first and second round draft picks, and a mediocre young player, Jiri Novotny, who was a recent first round pick. Along with the deadline trade that shipped out Jamie Heward, these moves also gave the Capitals a lack of veteran offensive help and a void of leadership that would help them fall down the standings from playoff near-miss to today's draft lottery bliss. Even with these moves in place, they weren't taking any chances.
Timely Injuries
There is no test in hockey for whether a player is injured. Some players play with broken legs. Some sit out with sore thumbs. If a physician employed by the team says that the player cannot play because of an injury, he is placed on "injured reserve," and his salary for that period of time is picked up by the team's insurance. Thus the team has no oversight and no financial burden in declaring players injured. The rules apparently assume that a team wants every one of its players healthy in order to win.
While there have always been abuses of this lenient and misguided policy, The New Jersey Devils blew the lid off last summer, when they got out of a desperate salary cap situation by declaring Alexander Mogilny injured for the season. If the Devils had been forced to pay the salary they had promised their aging winger, they would have had to trade away one of their best players to keep their payroll under the limit. The Capitals were one of the only teams that had saved enough room under the salary cap to absorb an all-star castoff like Brian Rafalski or Scott Gomez. In fact, the Caps were reportedly trying to get Gomez for Tomas Fleishmann and draft picks before New Jersey declared the Mogilny injury.
After the league failed to take action against New Jersey's blatant abuse, and the Caps were denied a chance to acquire one of the league's best centers for an unproven rookie, the team took advantage of the system that had wronged it. During the final two months of the season, the Capitals declared injuries to, on a rotating basis, nearly every player on their roster. At one point, Lawrence Nycholat was pronounced injured without any mention of a specific injury. In recent years the Capitals had switched from reporting exact injury locations and types to simply saying "lower body injury" or "upper body injury." This was still a new low. Maybe not as low as New Jersey, but low nonetheless.
The constant stream of injuries allowed the Caps to fill their lineup with minor league players and to keep their line combinations unstable. Beyond instability and dilution, the lineup shuffling gave the Capitals a chance to take a look at how their minor league players stacked up against major league competition, and to keep the farm team happy. Callups to the majors raise players' salaries during the time they're called up, but the rise in morale can last a lifetime. Since the Caps plan to build a successful NHL team for the future through the success of their AHL-leading farm team in Hershey, it's important for them to show that commitment to their minor league players.
Even better for the Caps, a documented high number of injuries provides the perfect excuse to give to naive fans who thought the Caps should have been winning and trying to get into the playoffs. After all, how can a team win if its players are injured? Only Ovechkin played every single game this season. While the announcers on CSN call this a testament to his durability, it may be more of a testament to his marketability, and the team's desire to grow their brand.
Commitment to Defense
Ovechkin, meanwhile, wasn't quite himself. Through January, the 2006 rookie of the year produced at least one point every other game he played. In his previous NHL season, Ovechkin had only one two-game pointless streak. In February and March, 2007, Ovechkin had two separate three game pointless streaks and one four game pointless streak. The coaching staff claimed that their star player had been asked to focus on playing within the team's defensive system. This didn't quite explain why, during this stretch, Ovechkin and Semin could be seen blocking each other's shots.
Nonetheless, one could easily see flaws in the Caps' defensive game, and one could see that, with the team giving up on the season it made sense for Ovechkin and Semin to learn more about defense in order to succeed next year. While a commitment to defense can help any team succeed, the Caps are deluding themselves if they think their biggest defensive worries are at Left Wing. In fact, the problems with the Caps defense are mostly at the position called "defense." Any seven Capitals defensemen, combined, have played fewer NHL games altogether than Teppo Numminen of the Buffalo Sabres.
In spite of the lack of defensive support, Ovechkin and Semin were each able to win games single-handedly for the Capitals when they were given free rein to try to score. While teaching them to play defense might help them contribute to a winning team for years after they lose some of their youthful exuberance and scoring prowess, there's no denying that the "experiment" helped forge a predictable block of losses in the short term.
Obviously any kind of losing takes its toll, and although we may never know whether the season was intentionally thrown away or just carried under by an infinite series of coincidental misfires, we do know how Ovechkin felt about it. One week into March he told a Toronto reporter, "We have to sign good players and I hope we do . . . I want to play on a good team."