On Frozen Blog

(Channeling Elton John) (Kidding) Sir Elton almost certainly didn’t have the 2007 postseason aspirations of the Washington Capitals in mind when he recorded ‘Candle in the Wind,’ but this morning said candle is tottering in Tornado Alley. It’s been pleasant imagining our torment in the Igloo drawing to a Baltimore Colts-like close this season, but tomorrow afternoon, I suspect, we’ll be reminded of Kansas City’s proximity to mobile home mayhem as Sidney & Co. State Farm claim our season. And right about now I wouldn’t mind auditioning Elton in front of Kolzig’s crease.
There are nemesis teams . . . and then there are the Florida Panthers. As in the last-place-in-the-Southeast-all-season-long Florida Panthers (until this morning), whom we can’t remain competitive with into a second period. A fourth-place club in the Southeast last season, they took seven of eight from the Caps then. The first clear sign this winter of funnel cloud formation for me was the Saturday matinee immediately before the All Star break, a rematch with the Cats precisely a week after the 7-3, 50-plus-shots-surrendered mauling in Sunrise. A lifeless Caps team on January 20 whimpered into the break on the short end of a 4-1 game.
Realignment, anyone?
Then they returned from the break and laid an egg in Carolina. They won the next night’s rematch, but that was misleading: they were solidly outshot, and they were the beneficiaries of numerous Carolina miscues laid at the feet of our snipers.
Injuries tell a fair portion of this season’s mid-season collapse, but they do not account for the quasi-regular lifelessness gutting the competitiveness out of games before many fannies have found their seats. Ronnie Wilson’s last couple of Caps’ teams had the Dahlen-Halpern-Kono line to thwart early opposition surges, settle things down, home and away. It also chipped in timely goals. This Caps’ team doesn’t. It also doesn’t have a superstar forward yet able to embrace high stakes showdowns and will his undermanned team to a tough victory.
Yet.
Nor is the blame to be shouldered solely by the super-skilled sophomore. Last season’s less talented Caps, overmatched virtually every night, fairly thrilled its fans with its tenacity, its perserverence, its gumption and guile. And what sets this season so disspiritingly apart from last is that the very agents of that heart-and-soul outfit this season are . . . AWOL. I don’t envy GMGM as winter turns to spring and he confronts personnel decisions all of us thought long settled by last season’s grinding success.