Former Capitals coach Bruce “Butch” Cassidy (who famously wrote his plays on napkins, and then brought the napkins to practice) has just been fired by the Kingston Frontenacs of the Ontario Hockey League after they lost six straight games. The firing from the junior team confirms the suspicions of many Caps fans who remembered the 2003-2004 season and though the coach might have been slightly less than qualified for the NHL.
Cassidy joined the Capitals in the fall of 2003 after having won a championship with an already great club in his first year in the International Hockey League. He was expected to be some sort of prodigy and figure out a way to guide the Capitals’ star-studded lineup to greatness. That Caps team still had a lot of the talent from the 1998 club that made it to the Stanley Cup Finals, plus it had superstars Jaromir Jagr and Robert Lang and a center named Michael Nylander. Their payroll that year was greater than the combined payrolls of the Pittsburgh Penguins and Florida Panthers. Cassidy was so sure of himself that he didn’t even carry a playbook, coming to practice instead with plays sketched out on napkins. The season that followed was horrible.
The Capitals know a thing or two about losing. In 74-75 they set the NHL record for the most losses ever, but they had never lost so much with so many talented players. Throughout the season, Capitals right wingers Jagr and Peter Bondra were neck and neck for the league lead in goals. Lang flirted with the league lead in points. Sergei Gonchar was one of the highest scoring defensemen in the NHL. In spite of all that, the team ended the season in a dead heat with the Panthers, Penguins and the Chicago Blackhawks for last overall. They did so badly that they were allowed to draft first and pick Alexander Ovechkin.
Along the way to completely falling apart, Cassidy was fired, and then the team traded away Bondra, Lang, Gonchar, Nylander and others. They even paid the New York Rangers millions of dollars to take Jagr away. In the hearts and minds of Washington’s hockey fans, Jagr and Cassidy will both share the blame for the wasted season, but for every fan who ever banged a fist on the glass and yelled, “Butch Cassidy, you couldn’t coach in juniors,” it turns out you were right.
