By this we mean moves that will help right now, i.e., the next few months. Draft picks and prospects are not considered relevant for the 2007 playoffs. Several of these teams mortgaged their futures, true; but who added the best assets for a Cup run right now?
The biggest movers are listed below. Choose one, and feel free to explain your choice in the comments.
I’ve long been of the opinion that a healthy, playoff-viable NHL club cannot strike out with its selections at any draft; the compensation required for it is too implausible in succeeding drafts. Even with 2002’s success (Semin, Gordon, Eminger, Max II, and through trades Fleischmann and Klepis), there’s a price to be paid for 2001’s failure, and to some extent I think we’re seeing that this season. A lot of the league strengthened itself with that terrific ‘01 class, and the Caps did not.
Jiri Novotny’s acquisition from Buffalo yesterday can be viewed within the prism of belatedly addressing the Caps’ ‘01 shortcomings. An ‘01 draftee, 22nd overall by the Sabres, Novotny now joins new teammate Shaone Morrisonn (Bruins, no. 19 overall) from that class. The Caps at long last have somewhat filled the gaping hole left by summer ’01’s poor drafting.
Speaking of entry drafts, the fax ink from yesterday’s deal with Buffalo wasn’t dry before visitors to the Caps’ message boards could download seemingly dozens of pages of protest from the glass-is-not-only-half-empty, it’s-got-a-chipped-edge-to-meet-your-mouth crowd. At OFB, we’ve long referred to them as the Doom and Gloom set. Their chief point of outrage, it seemed, was a collective sense that the ‘07 Entry Draft was “weak,” and so the Buffalo first rounder, late as it was certain be, wasn’t anything to be happy over. Interesting. 2002, I remember vividly, was alleged to be among the worst pool of talent ever. Even 1996’s draft, which genuinely can be labeled atrocious, eventually delivered Dainius Zubrus to D.C. My point is, every NHL draft possesses talented young hockey players; the job of McPhee and his scouts is to find it.
I’ve another bone to pick with the message board GMs: for years we’ve had to endure their claims that when it comes to Dainius Zubrus, he was a hopelessly misplaced, “non-finishing” top-line center. Let’s all agree that he’s not a no. 1 pivot on a playoff club. But doesn’t it stand to reason that were he more the checking line kind of guy, he most assuredly wouldn’t fetch a no. 1 pick . . . let alone two? And yet, when that’s what Buffalo returned yesterday, these same naysayers wrung their hands over the “poor” return. Hypocrites.
Yesterday was a frenzy of attempted fact gathering by fans and media related to player movement, all of it more or less pursued on line. TSN and the NHL Network were broadcasting breathless accounts of the transactions all day long. One GM recently told Sports Illustrated that deadline day “ought to be a holiday in Canada.” Locally, we in the Capitals’ community are indebted to the committed labor of Tarik El-Bashir, who was lodged all morning, afternoon, and evening at Verizon Center, regularly updating his blog with trade intelligence, and Mike Vogel, who for a period of time yesterday afternoon was brought into the Caps’ hockey operations’ inner circle. The efforts of both men made for a marvelously compelling afternoon. If you weren’t convinced before about the revolution taking place in hockey news coverage — most particularly this season — yesterday ought to have ushered in a fresh reconsideration for you.
I’ve long been of the opinion that a healthy, playoff-viable NHL club cannot strike out with its selections at any draft; the compensation required for it is too implausible in succeeding drafts. Even with 2002’s success (Semin, Gordon, Eminger, Max II, and through trades Fleischmann and Klepis), there’s a price to be paid for 2001’s failure, and to some extent I think we’re seeing that this season. A lot of the league strengthened itself with that terrific ‘01 class, and the Caps did not.
Jiri Novotny’s acquisition from Buffalo yesterday can be viewed within the prism of belatedly addressing the Caps’ ‘01 shortcomings. An ‘01 draftee, 22nd overall by the Sabres, Novotny now joins new teammate Shaone Morrisonn (Bruins, no. 19 overall) from that class. The Caps at long last have somewhat filled the gaping hole left by summer ’01’s poor drafting.
Speaking of entry drafts, the fax ink from yesterday’s deal with Buffalo wasn’t dry before visitors to the Caps’ message boards could download seemingly dozens of pages of protest from the glass-is-not-only-half-empty, it’s-got-a-chipped-edge-to-meet-your-mouth crowd. At OFB, we’ve long referred to them as the Doom and Gloom set. Their chief point of outrage, it seemed, was a collective sense that the ‘07 Entry Draft was “weak,” and so the Buffalo first rounder, late as it was certain be, wasn’t anything to be happy over. Interesting. 2002, I remember vividly, was alleged to be among the worst pool of talent ever. Even 1996’s draft, which genuinely can be labeled atrocious, eventually delivered Dainius Zubrus to D.C. My point is, every NHL draft possesses talented young hockey players; the job of McPhee and his scouts is to find it.
Yesterday was a frenzy of attempted fact gathering by fans and media related to player movement, all of it more or less pursued on line. TSN and the NHL Network were broadcasting breathless accounts of the transactions all day long. One GM recently told Sports Illustrated that deadline day “ought to be a holiday in Canada.” Locally, we in the Capitals’ community are indebted to the committed labor of Tarik El Bashir, who was lodged all morning, afternoon, and evening at Verizon Center, regularly updating his blog with trade intelligence, and Mike Vogel, who for a period of time yesterday afternoon was brought into the Caps’ hockey operations’ inner circle. The efforts of both men made for a marvelously compelling afternoon. If you weren’t convinced before about the revolution taking place in hockey news coverage — most particularly this season — yesterday ought to have ushered in a fresh reconsideration for you.
The Caps clearly showed the effect of trading Zubrus, whom they used in all situations and was a leader for the team. Ovechkin’s first goal seemed to shake them out of the funk. Even though they lost in a shootout, the way they came back after such a terrible start was heartening. Next stop: not having a bad start.
Tarik is on it.
An ‘07 first rounder and young, former first-round center Jiri Novotny are coming back.
Pierre McGuire, on TSN this afternoon: “We have to take the robber’s mask off of George McPhee’s face.”
2:45 update: Mike Vogel has been invited into the Caps’ “war room” this afternoon by George McPhee and is reporting that “more irons are in the fire.” Cool stuff.
I restricted my survey to the past 25 years — the Poile and McPhee reigns. David Poile’s first significant transaction for the team, the September 1982 hoodwinking of the Habs, is widely regarded as an organization saver and the milestone that transitioned the club from laughingstock to established outfit.
And it just neatly happened to have transpired 25 years ago.
But first I needed a classification system to categorize individual trades. I settled on three classes of deals; they were conceived with the March deadline in mind but applied to the whole of the calendar year as well. Significant trades involved at least one name/impact player and or at least a first round pick being moved. Major trades had multiple name/impact players and or high draft picks moving in both directions. And Blockbusters were, well, easy to identify. The Caps haven’t been involved in too many of those. They are landscape-altering enough so as to occasion above-the-fold, sports page 1 placement by The Washington Post. Even if the Redskins are holding offseason mini-camp at the time.
So for instance, Brendan Witt’s being moved to Nashville at the eleventh hour last March for a first round pick (and Kris Beech) was a significant trade but not a major one. (It seems more significant now that that pick delivered Simeon Varlamov.) Anyway, to no one’s surprise, the vast majority of deals made in the NHL are of the sub-significant variety, and this holds true of course with the Caps.
My next finding in my survey was that the three most significant trades/transactions in Caps’ history, in my humble opinion, had no relationship with the March trade deadline whatsoever. And Poile’s September 1982 magic topped my list. Without it, it’s highly doubtful there is a Capitals team in D.C. today. To refresh, Poile shipped Ryan Walter and Rick Green to Montreal for Rod Langway, Craig Laughlin, Brian Engblom, and Doug Jarvis. There was so much talent brought in with that deal that half of it retired to notable hockey broadcasting careers as well. It’s a wonder any Montreal telephone operator has put through any call from Poile to the Habs’ offices since. If we still had telephone operators.
The second most significant transaction played a foundational role in my growing to hate Washington summers. On July 16, 1990, the Caps lost Scott Stevens to a restricted free agent signing sheet from St. Louis. The Caps were awarded five first round picks as compensation, among them Jason Allison and Sergei Gonchar. Still, there’s no compensating for the loss of one of the five greatest blueliners in NHL history. The Stevens’ departure almost certainly remains the greatest “What if?” lament among the Caps’ fanbase.
And my third most significant trade/transaction in club history — however fruitless its harvest proved — was the July 11, 2001, deal with Craig Patrick and the Pens that landed Jaromir Jagr and Frantisek Kucera for a bag of prospect pucks. It made the cover of The Hockey News the following week, Jagr was widely identified as the greatest player in the game at the time, and in his prime, and the deal bred no small number of Stanley Cup forecasts for the Caps the falling fall.
April was the cruelest month for T.S. Elliot; July is for Caps’ fans.
Soon into my survey I encountered a murky tension with my classification system, namely, the effect that time always has on assessing a trade’s significance. To wit, in March 1989 the Caps acquired Calle Johansson and a second round pick (which turned out to be Byron Dafoe) for Clint Malarchuk, Grant Ledyard, and a sixth rounder. The hockey world didn’t gasp that March. Nor did much of D.C. And yet, 10 years later, what seemed only a moderately significant deal at the time certainly proved to be a major one in the history of the Caps’ blueline. So how do I classify it? Continue reading ›
When Gustaffson first encouraged me to attend, I was a little “iffy” on the whole thing. The idea of traipsing around the Verizon Center with a bunch of women for three hours did not sound like my idea of a good time. I had mental images of hundreds of women making mad dashes to the players that attended, similar to the scenes that you see on television for the big wedding gown sales. But Gustaffson is intent on making me a diehard hockey fan, so away I went.
I will be the first to admit that I had a great time and the event was very well planned. Everyone was split into smaller groups and rotated through the five different activities, so the chaos was kept to a minimum. There was a wide range of women there as well, from hockey moms to puck bunnies and everyone in between. Yes, there were plenty of ladies in attendance hoping to snag some quality time with the young, single players. However, there were just as many women asking thoughtful hockey related questions. Plus, we all got to shoot pucks on the ice with Jamie Heward, Shaone Morrisson and Coach Dean Evason. After initial reluctance to get out there (I did have on 2 inch heels) I can happily say I not only stayed on my feet, but also made contact with the puck and got it into the goal! So what if the goal was only ten feet away? Continue reading ›
A fabulous and fitting haiku on the trade deadline from Daily Sports Haiku:
Bravo!
The Capitals have traded Richard Zednik to the New York Islanders, reportedly for a second round pick in the 2007 draft.
Decent return for a rental — Zednik is an unrestricted free agent at the end of the season — particularly for one that played only 32 games this year.
With the devastating but clean hit Chris Neil put on Chris Drury last week and the responses it has occasioned from seemingly everybody in Buffalo — will the city’s Mayor next send a tear-stained letter to Gary Bettman? — we may be witnessing the most powerful case yet for Kansas City being awarded a hockey team. Just not Pittsburgh’s.
On Saturday Sabres’ owner Tom Golisano, informed that day by the NHL that his organization’s hand-wringing over a clean hit was baseless, took the unprecedented action of putting in writing his whining. Take a look:
Particularly helpful, wasn’t it, for Golisano to outline for the commissioner the instances in which hitting in hockey is merited? Who knew? Note, though, that Golisano didn’t acknowledge hitting’s role in intimidating or changing the momentum of a hockey game . . . or perhaps even sending a message for the postseason . . . even though those have been a part of hockey since, say, its inception. (Bettman might have responded to the letter with his own asking “What’s with the slug in the letterhead?”) Golisano’s unseemly woe-is-my-team missive occurred fast on the heels of his coach’s meltdown before the media last week. The heaviness of hankies in upstate New York only continued to grow, however.
Saturday night Ottawa and Buffalo met again, and during an intermission the Ottawa Sun’s Bruce Garrioch fielded fresh sobs from a Buffalo broadcast crew. Imagine inviting a guest on the air to discuss a high-profile, highly controversial piece of communication and then, irritated by the guest’s defense of eons of hockey’s toughness and his calling out the coward who wrote it, dismissing those views by claiming “in fairness, you haven’t read [Golisano's] letter.” That’s precisely what the Buffalo broadcast crew did.
Garrioch accurately characterized the Golisano letter as “whining to a new level,” pointing out that last season, in the playoffs, Flyers’ owner Ed Snider never thought to bellyache to Bettman when his player, R.J. Umberger, was laid out in even more viscious fashion by Buffalo’s Brian Campbell. Here’s Garrioch the sensible in smackdown mode:
One can’t help but place the Sabres’ sullying of our sport this past week in the context of a battered wife syndrome for sports set off city-wide perhaps by Scott Norwood. And Brett Hull. More recently Alexander Ovechkin. And now Chris Neil. Buffalo has a terrific hockey climate, and some superbly skilled legacy. What it doesn’t have much of these days is heart and grit.
The league is currently testing distribution of its cable and satellite NHL Center Ice out-of-market game package on the Web, and it could make it available to any hockey fan with a high-speed-Internet connection before the end of the season, according to Keith Ritter, president of NHL Interactive Cyber Enterprises.
“We’ve been testing it, but our primary concern is the security of the gating and the ability to make sure our broadcast partners are protected,” Ritter said. “So far, the test is going very well, and I’m hopeful that we’ll be able to offer it in the not-too-distant future.”
Currently the NBA, MLB, and ESPN all offer broadband access to compliment their current TV subscription service.
Ritter mentions that there will be a yet to be determined fee for the broadband access and that 80% of the traffic on NHL.com is accessed by broadband.
“Given the high level of technical literacy that hockey fans enjoy, we want to be in as many platforms as we can be,” he said. “I think that this is yet another place that [our fans] are and it’s another place we need to be.”
This is good news for all hockey fans currently without a way to access NHL Center Ice. As a subscriber for the past 6 years, I highly recommend it, especially come playoff time. I wonder, though, will the feeds currently blacked out on my satellite also get blacked out on the internet?
A tap of the stick on the ice to Kukla’s Korner for the assist.
Two points of a home-and-home weekend against the Devils is not bad, but I think we could have had more.
A welcome win in the swamp, against a top-notch goaltender on a team that is leading its division. What I thought was going to be the first game in the most boring home-and-home series in recent memory turned out to have some scoring, some hitting, a few diving defensive plays, and we even got a tilt, though not much of one. It’s amazing what a win against a solid opponent will do in regards to enjoying the game.
Well, a pleasant result, and the Senators/Sabres rematch later tonight on Center Ice. Not a bad way to spend a Saturday.
The Caps probably aren’t going to make the playoffs, that much I think we can agree on. Washington have a wealth of decent-to-good prospects in the fold; so many, in fact, that it’s hard to imagine the club taking another significant number back as the result of trades. There are glaring needs at center and defense, and filling them with solid veterans would really help the club.
With that criteria in mind, we move on to assessing what assets the Caps could move in the next few days. The following players will be unrestricted free agents at the end of the season:
Certainly I have to chat with Nate Ewell about greater scrutiny of the credentialed.
I met the backup scribe, Corey Masisak, in the Verizon Center press lounge before Wednesday night’s game against San Jose, and his roots notwithstanding, I liked him. I asked to meet with him because a couple of weeks ago I thought that the novelty of his circumstances at the Times — stepping in at a moment’s notice, in the middle of the hockey season, to cover for an area legend fallen ill — suggested a novel story. I came away impressed by his handling of his beat-baptism-by-fire 2007; he is poised and composed and offers a quiet thoughtfulness that belies his youthful appearance.
His has been a fast rise in a nascent journalism career. He left Pennsylvania for the University of Maryland in 2000, drawn to College Park for the quality of its journalism program. He covered various Terrapin sports teams for the school’s well regarded Diamondback student newspaper. He’s been at the Times about three years, where he’s covered minor league baseball and Navy football. His selection to cover for Fay, however, wasn’t entirely related to the quality of his coverage on the other beats.
“In the [Times'] newsroom the editors knew I was the only one who liked hockey,” he told me, laughing.
“Of course it’s not the way you want to start an assignment,” he added.
Back in December, Masisak “shadowed” Fay on a Saturday night Flyers game at Verizon Center. “That was a huge help,” he said. But soon thereafter the beat became his, and while he’d been around the Nationals’ locker room a bit, this was going to be his first full-time assignment covering a pro sports team. He confessed to a serious case of fright.
“I remember doing nothing but intense research — constant reading — the first four nights after I got [the assignment]. Coming in in the middle of the season, I needed to learn names and faces, what the team had done . . . it wasn’t as easy as I thought it would be.”
The Times, like so many other large print media outlets these days, has seriously scaled back its staffing on team road trips. Masisak, who traveled frequently on the road with Terrapin teams, knows well the value of being seen day in, day out by the athletes he’s covering. Recently, at an LA Kings practice at Kettler Capitals Iceplex, Masisack was the only beat reporter present.
“It makes a difference,” he noted. “When you get to work with guys every day, you’re certainly going to develop relationships.”
Masisak’s work covering Navy football made him a bit apprehensive initially about moving to a pro sports beat. “You don’t get higher quality [individuals] than those guys in Annapolis,” he said. But working with hockey players, he soon found that “character” athletes could be found in NHL rinks as well.
“Everybody in hockey is so nice,” he told me. “I was working on piece about Eric Staal, and he gave me his parents’ phone number up in Thunder Bay [Ontario]. I got a hold of his mom, and after talking to her she had Eric’s dad ring me later. This is what it’s like among players, coaches, managers, and their families across the league.”
He picks up scraps of information
cupajoe.jpeg
He’s adept at adaptation
Because for strangers and arrangers
Constant change is here to stay
He’s got a force field and a flexible plan
He’s got a date with fate in a black sedan
He plays fast forward for as long as he can
But he won’t need a bed
He’s a digital man
—”Digital Man,” Neil Peart
Bloggers’ row for Wednesday night’s game against San Jose included my good friend Eric from Off Wing Opinion and two new ones, Rebecca (aka Caps Chick) of A View from the Cheap Seats, and Rob of Random Reality Thoughts. Rebecca is a graduate of world-famous McGill University in Montreal. This made me nearly insanely jealous; I briefly asked her about the prevalence of hockey on campus and then assigned her the impossible fantasy honor of skating from class to class over the course of her four years there.
I was immersed in a quasi-crowded press box with these distinguished bloggers and print and broadcast press, and an ongoing discussion among us New-Age media folk was the pace and surety of change that Bloggerdom was leading. Rob was especially animated by and assured of this revolution.
“They (the Old media) still don’t get it,” he told me. “They’re merely adding layers of copy and paying lip service to the heart of the revolution.” I knew exactly what he meant. While there’s a vital common ground between the Old and New media with say professional standards of journalism — judicious fact-checking; getting quoted reflections accurately conveyed; exercising discerning news value judgments — that common ground swiftly disappears in vapor trails as the digital age demolishes conventional notions of beat coverage.
Principally with its edgy electronics and its passion prose.
Where Old Media has Dragnet’s Jack Webb seeking “Just the facts, ma’am,” the New is dealing in DNA evidence.
Rob then informed me of a startling bit of data: the planet apparently has 57 million registered bloggers. He asked me how many of them I thought had formal journalism training.
“At least 45 million would be without, I’d guess,” I replied. Interesting, though, that when I took a quick survey among us, three of the four had B.A.s in journalism and or real pro journalism experience in our pre-blogging careers. The unsupervised and untrained in their basements and in their pajamas with laptops libel didn’t quite apply in Blogger’s row this night.
The elder statesmen of Blogger’s row Wednesday, Eric and I chuckled at our Paleozic Era-like era of copy layout labor with “rulers and wax.”
Earlier, down in the press lounge, the four of us were lucky enough to share a dining table with an extremely hockey knowledgeable reporter from Sports Illustrated. He regaled us with his insider’s knowledge of some of the game’s leading personalities, but then he began a grilling of Eric and the Off Wing Opinion enterprise, and I was struck by the basic nature of his inquiries. SI of course has SI.com, which includes sports blogging, and the two entities share reporter staffing and copy. SI is Old Media, and this was an Old Media reporter, and even with the New brought inside the Old, and lodged there for some years, the culture of the change was still somewhat alien to him. As I thought about this I saw a parallel with the Washington Post’s recent efforts at playing blogging catch-up. Continue reading ›
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 1980 Olympic Gold Medal - w/ Ribbon 1980 Olympic Gold Medal - w/ Ribbon 1980 Olympic Gold Medal - w/ Ribbon 1980 Olympic Gold Medal - w/ Ribbon 1980 Olympic Gold Medal - w/ Ribbon 1980 Olympic Gold Medal - w/ Ribbon |
Jim Craig North Easton, Mass. |
Ken Morrow Flint, Mich. |
Mike Ramsey Minneapolis, Minn. |
Mark Johnson Madison, Wis. |
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Mike Eruzione Winthrop, Mass. |
Dave Silk Scituate, Mass. |
Bill Baker Grand Rapids, Minn. |
Neal Broten Roseau, Minn. |
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Dave Christian Warroad, Minn. |
Steve Christoff Richfield, Minn. |
John Harrington Virginia, Minn. |
Steve Janaszak White Bear Lake, Minn. |
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Rob McClanahan St. Paul, Minn. |
Jack O’Callahan Charlestown, Mass. |
Mark Pavelich Eveleth, Minn. |
Buzz Schneider Babbitt, Minn. |
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Eric Strobel Rochester, Minn. |
Bob Suter Madison, Wis. |
Phil Verchota Duluth, Minn. |
Mark Wells St. Clair Shores, Minn. |
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Herb Brooks Head Coach |
Craig Patrick Assistant Coach |
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