Caps Briefing: Searching for Scotty Bowman
Remember the beginning of this season, when the Caps were awful, and everybody was about to get fired? Then-coach Glen Hanlon famously summed up the pressure he was under by comparing his situation bitterly to a daring move in the early 1990s by the winningest coach in NHL history. He said, "When you’re Scotty Bowman, you put [Sergei] Fedorov on defense and you’re a genius. Now, when you’re Glen Hanlon if you don’t play the [right] guys the very first day of training camp for the next six months all together, you’re a nitwit."
Fast forward to this week, and we find new Capitals coach Bruce Boudreau struggling in game three of an unexpected playoff series against the Philadelphia Flyers. Emerging offensive defenseman Mike Green is in the penalty box for fighting Scott Hartnell in defense of his linemate Shaone Morrisonn, and Boudreau moved newly acquired 37 year-old center Sergei Fedorov back to defense to keep the attack going. Fedorov looked OK, but failed to salvage victory from the jaws of defeat, and the Caps head into tonight's game trailing Philadelphia 2-1 in the best of seven series.
So, if putting Sergei Fedorov on defense doesn't automatically win games and make you a genius anymore, then where do you have to put him? Boudreau isn't saying, but the Post's Tariq El-Bashir says Fedorov has been practicing beside Alexander Ovechkin on the team's first line. Will the combination of the most accomplished player in the league with its most talented player lead to greatness? Or is Fedorov, who played most of this season in a defensive role on the third line of the lowly Columbus Blue Jackets, too old for this sort of thing?
Bruce Boudreau is a terrific, experienced coach whose focus on offense has helped a team full of offensively gifted players succeed where they had failed miserably under Hanlon's demands that they play a more well-rounded game. There are few Caps fans who would argue that the team needed more time under a defensive system to get ready for this playoff drive. A few Flyers fans, on the other hand, recently wished for Hanlon's expertise. It would be hard to call either coach a nitwit, but it's quite poetic that Boudreau now finds the fate of his season hanging from exactly the hook his predecessor dreamed of.