Last spring the Washington Capitals made headlines as they pulled off an 11-2 run to make the playoffs, and Alex Ovechkin broke the all time record for goals by a left wing and earned himself his first Hart Trophy and Lester B. Pearson Award as the league's most valuable player.

Just to show that these headlines were not lost on the local broadcasting community, Washington Business Journal reports today that the Caps have now scored a team-record 50 high definition broadcasts with Comcast Sports Net for the upcoming season.

CSN will also broadcast 23 other games in regular definition, for a total of 73 games on the local cable channel. Versus have already announced their schedule of seven Capitals games for national broadcast, and NBC have maintained the option to nationally broadcast up to four more. This gives the Capitals somewhere between 80 and 84 of their games on television for the upcoming regular season, which is an impressive range when you consider that they will only play 82.

Hockey is a fast-paced sport focused on tiny details, so it benefits from high definition even more than other sports. Last season the Capitals came back from a recent series of disappointing seasons with a dramatic return to the playoffs at the same time that they began to receive extensive coverage in high definition. Predictably, their ratings were sky-high. Between the exciting storyline and the improved medium, audiences couldn't get enough.

It's great to see the networks have responded with even more attention to a team that is becoming dominant in the Eastern Conference. We look forward to watching more than half of the season from and still feeling like we're right there in the building, except with two major improvements. First, $7.50 will buy us six beers instead of one. Second, wearing pants will be optional.