On Frozen Blog

Thursday’s season-opening loss in Madison Square Garden was especially galling for Caps’ fans, for before they could settle in their recliners with the season’s first puck soda, MegaMercenary Jaromir Jagr had scored the game’s first goal . . . before the season was 30 seconds old. This sort of statement sniping, Caps’ fans know all too well, was conspicuously absent during his two-and-a-half seasons in a Caps’ sweater from 2001 — 2004.
For Caps’ management and players, the sour Jagr era is perhaps entirely forgotten, fortuitously sanitized by the arrival of organization-altering Alexander the GR8. But today I stroll down Woe St. one more time to raise with you yet another instance of remarkable media malfeasance; to remind you of what our enemies never have and never will: Jagr, being paid $11 million dollars annually here by the Caps, quit on them. Don’t take my word for it. De facto Captain Kolzig said precisely this in an interview with Caps’ man about communications, Mike Vogel, this past summer. An MP3 of the interview is still available on the team’s web site.

Two-and-a-half years in a sweater is a bit more than an end-of-season rental or a long weekend, so why hasn’t there been anything beyond the superficial “it was a bad fit” or “simply a failed experiment” in terms of MSM post mortems of Jagr’s time in D.C.? My theory: Because for most in the media, being a Cap is hockey’s equivalent to being a taxi squader for the Arizona Cardinals. The Caps are a big-league organization that I guess once in a while has to be acknowledged to exist, and to the extent that big-name hockey players come up short here, it’s presumed not to be their fault but rather predetermined by the black cloud of fate that ever hovers above our Tier III puck outpost. Perception driving media reality.
Kolzig’s is a serious charge, but one backed (dramatically) by statistics.
In his three years prior to arriving in D.C., Jagr put up 127, 96, and 121 points for the Pittsburgh Penguins, for an average of 114 points per season. He never scored fewer than 42 goals in those three seasons. In the very prime of his career in the summer of 2001, he was dealt to D.C. and scored the really big bucks in a long-term deal with the Caps. As in, an Austin Powers ransom of $11 million a season. Surrounded by not-insignificant talent here (Peter Bondra, Sergei Gonchar, Robert Lang), Jagr max-ed out at 36 goals in 2002-03 and never reached even 80 points. His average of 78 points in his two full seasons in D.C. falls 36 short of his previous three in western Pa.
Thirty six!
But maybe in his early 30s all those years of nagging groin injuries had caught up to him and slowed him down a bit, you might suggest; he certainly looked slow in a Caps’ sweater. Fast forward to 2005-06, with a lost year to the NHL lockout further aging him. Now on Broadway (where he always wanted to be), Jagr nightly blows past Eastern Conference defenders to the tune of 54 goals and 69 assists en route to First-team All-Star status. His pivot for much of last season was the underwhelming Michael Nylander, who makes no one forget Robert Lang.
Instantly, Jagr’s failures in D.C. are wholly forgotten; he is the subject of fawning and thick print praise, from New York and national media, his career “revitalized” under the bright lights of the really big city. A Hart Trophy finalist! Yet no one in the press corps all last season asked the obvious: How did the do-nothing in D.C. so dramatically amp it up in MSG? Deep in the bowels of the Caps’ locker room for nearly three consecutive years, Jagr succeeded mostly in breeding separatism and disharmony, and even with dozens of press hacks in there night after night, week after week, year after year, nary a peep out of them about this.
Jagr is a first-ballot Hall-of-Famer, one of the 20 most gifted wings in hockey history, almost certainly the greatest player ever to come out of the Czech Republic. But the chronicle of his career — to the extent the MSM is allowed to craft its entirety — appears headed to contain an extraordinary white-washing of an important failure: when he was summoned to lead a mildly struggling franchise into the next level of competitive success, he didn’t merely come up short but actually gave up trying.