Caps Briefing: Dangerous Weapons
Caps fans should certainly expect a lot more of the rough stuff from the four new
players the organization traded for yesterday. Photo by timkelley.
You will recognize, we're certain, Milan Jurcina, who played side by side with Zdeno Chara, throwing monster hits while helping Slovakia reach the bronze medal game in Vancouver. The Caps traded Jurcina to Columbus before the Olympics to pick up nasty, hard-hitting winger Jason Chimera. Following Chimera's acquisition, the Capitals put together the best winning streak in team history. But why not bring Jurcina back for a sixth-round draft pick? The last productive player the Caps drafted in the sixth-round or later has retired. His name is Peter Bondra and he is the general manager of that Slovak team.
Chimera certainly recognizes Capitals' new acquisition Eric Belanger as the guy who knocked him out last fall with a brutal, illegal hit from behind in a meaningless preseason game, where neither player had anything to prove. When he's not braining opponents out of sheer pride, Belanger also kills penalties, wins faceoffs and scores goals. Of course, these are the two nicer guys the Caps picked up. The other two are a different story entirely.
Scott Walker waived the no-trade clause in his contract to come to Washington. Walker is 27th among active NHL players in career penalty minutes. He also has posted double-digit goal totals in six different seasons, and contributed 23 game winning goals to his three NHL teams. Walker is most famous, however, as we pointed out yesterday, for punching his friend Aaron Ward in the face while helping Carolina knock Boston out of last year's playoffs.
Compared to Joe Corvo, though, Walker is a boy scout. Corvo is one of the most consistent offensive defensemen in the NHL. If he hadn't been injured for most of this year, he would have been a great candidate for the U.S. Olympic lineup. Corvo has been in the top ten U.S.-born defensemen in scoring every year from 2003-04 to 2008-09. In 2007-08, he was second in that category to Brian Rafalski.
Why, then, is Corvo a strange addition to the Washington Capitals? Well, the Capitals have talked about adding character guys who aren't difficult to get along with in a locker room. (Read: the anti-Jaromir Jagr.) Last year, Corvo stood out on Carolina and revitalized an aging offense. This year, the team struggled even as star center Eric Staal continued to mature. Who should the Hurricanes scapegoat for that? Surely not the defenseman with all the random tattoos?
Okay, fine. Mike Green has more tattoos and plays great hockey. But Mike Green never punched an older woman in a nightclub or kicked her while she was down. Joe Corvo has a three-year suspended sentence for just such an incident in 2002, involving a woman who had just complained to nightclub management that Corvo touched her buttocks.
Still, there may be no better judge of his character than the journeyman coach who guided him through minor-league hockey before and after that incident. Corvo's coach at the time was Washington's favorite Slap Shot extra, Bruce Boudreau. Now coach of the Capitals, Boudreau must still have a solid understanding of what went through Corvo's mind, not only during that incident but for the next year of his life and his career as he sought to reconcile his actions with his identity.
Today, Corvo is eight years older and married to his high school sweetheart. He has been through anger management and has not relapsed into the kind of behavior that still makes self-respecting hockey fans question his humanity. Why do the Caps need him? The simple answer is that he is a good defenseman with great offensive skills, and he will give the Capitals a legitimate second power-play unit for the first time since the departure of Al Iafrate. Last year, Mike Green was injured in the first round of the playoffs; the Caps eventually lost in no small part because they had no alternative to Green on their power play. This year, for a reasonable price, they have someone who just played Green's exact role on a team that won its first two playoff series and advanced to the Eastern Conference Finals.
The more complex answer is that hockey isn't just about character.
Hockey is about skating, shooting, passing, stickhanding and hitting. Especially hitting, when we're talking about the playoffs. Scott Stevens, whom the Capitals correctly declined to offer a contract in the late '80s after he failed to stop teammates from sexually harassing an inebriated minor, left as a multimillionaire free agent and is now in hockey's hall of fame as one of the great hitters in the sport's history. So obviously, being enshrined in Toronto isn't about character. Slap Shot, that quintessential hockey movie, is not entirely about character either. It's about a team that can't win a game to save its life, and just when things can't get any worse, the manager trades for the three nastiest, most talentless goons in the league. These guys aren't there to even try to score goals. They're there to hit and to hurt, to leave their opponents bloody and bruised; suddenly, their teammates find that winning isn't so difficult anymore.
The first-place Caps haven't had trouble winning games this season, but in recent postseasons they've taken a consistent beating. Chimera, Walker, Belanger and Jurcina should all work together to help change that. If Corvo can funnel his rage at, say, Sidney Crosby, this year is going to be very different from anything we're used to. Will such an effort make Corvo's previous behavior acceptable? Of course not. A real man does not hit women. A real man does not touch women without their permission. A real man does not kick anybody when they're down. Will it put a brighter light on just how far Joe Corvo has come from the embarrassing mistakes of his youth? Washington hockey fans can certainly hope so.