At 2 p.m. the Capitals head to Nassau Coliseum to break a seven way tie for second overall in the NHL. Both the Capitals and the New York Islanders have won their first two games of this fresh season. By the time you get out of work today, one of these teams will pass Ottawa (two wins, one overtime loss) for first overall, and the other will plunge to a respectable eighth. Making things more…

The Capitals have assigned Ben Clymer to their farm team. For two years, Clymer has provided the Caps with leadership, toughness and first hand knowledge of what it’s like to win a Stanley Cup. This year and next year, he’ll take that knowledge to the American Hockey League’s Hershey Bears. Clymer joins Stanley Cup winner Joe Motzko, whom the Caps signed this summer as a free agent and demoted over the weekend, in giving the…

Yesterday a judge in a courtroom in the Virginia hinterlands wrote out some nasty doubletalk and upheld a set of draconian penalties Virginia has unleashed upon commuters with jobs in D.C., raising the question once again of why Northern Virginia taxpayers continue to fund a state government run by rural Southerners who hate us and want us to be miserable. Before yesterday’s ruling, the fees had been deemed unconstitutional in district courts in Henrico County…

When your alumni game features less than one former player for each year your franchise has played, and none of them play goalie, something might be wrong. The 2006-2007 season was a chance for the Washington Capitals to take a long, sometimes painful look at the prospects it has drafted and traded for in recent years. Over the season, the team discovered that these young players were generally young, inexperienced and insecure. With the right…

FRIDAY: >> If you still haven’t been out to a live show by The Lost Atoms, rock now or forever hold your peace. Shortly after tonight’s show at Velvet Lounge, guitarist Paul [] and bassist Keith will marry their beautiful and talented fiancees, and the band will be divorced. Explaining the breakup with a typically droll statement on the band’s blog, singer Matt Lame writes, “life happened, and there isn’t time.” It’s rumored the band…

Frederic Cassivi looked extremely confident in goal last night as he helped the Capitals maintain dignity through a three to zero loss at Toronto that could have been much worse. Cassivi preserved a scoreless tie with solid, calm, positional goaltending through twenty-three minutes of play in spite of receiving a dirty slash to the back of his helmet from notorious goon Darcy Tucker, who was immediately knocked to the ice by stalwart Caps defenseman John…

Tonight the Capitals will face the decisive game of their season. After weeks of injury troubles and youthful inconsistencies, the team finds itself in position to drop from twelfth in the East down to fourteenth, all in one night. The Capitals, who finished near the bottom of the league last season and retooled over the summer to perform better this season, are in a position to slip behind the Florida Panthers and Boston Bruins, who…

How unimportant is the Young Stars game? Well, they play it three days after the All-Star game, on a Tuesday. The teams are about half the size of real hockey teams, they skate four on four for the entire game, and the players aren’t allowed to hit each other.

Written by DCist Contributor Eli Resnick Several recent Washington Capitals draft picks and free agent signings have combined their efforts to take their team on a five-game winning streak, tightening the defending champions’ hold on the league lead. Their team, of course, is the Hershey Bears, the Caps affiliate in the American Hockey League. However, far from a random factoid, this is terrific news for the Capitals, who can’t always get by on the heroics…

Written by DCist contributor Eli Resnick Playing two games in two nights, four hundred miles apart, the Washington Capitals looked like a team in the middle of a grueling road trip last night, in their uninspired 4-1 loss to the Montreal Canadiens at Verizon Center. There were flashes of hope along the way. Lawrence Nycholat’s first-period slap-shot was deflected into the net, but the goal was immediately washed out. The Capitals also dished out a…