On Frozen Blog

This statement, blogged yesterday by beat guy Tarik El-Bashir, made me curious:

“it’s another slow day on the Caps’ beat.”

Having spent a fair portion of this spring inside the team’s offices and thought processes, I can assure, there is no dearth of activity or ideas in CapsLand. The transaction wire tells but one tale.

It’s the offseason for some of hockey’s beat reporters, but for the sport’s fans, there is none. Nor for its bloggers. (Most of them, anyway.) And this dynamic may, partly, be undergirding the media realignment we are witnessing within hockey’s coverage.

Both newspapers yesterday chronicled the “news” of Nicklas Backstrom’s impending arrival in Washington, but both accounts, predictably, were pro forma, cut-and-paste jobs from a press release. Meanwhile, Washington hockey bloggerdom was aware of the Swede’s arrival last weekend (some, earlier) and had spent much of May speculating about the young pivot’s winger pairings. Anyway, with present and past as a guide, I’m not sure we can expect any better from the beats.

But the purpose of this post isn’t to play a game of who scooped who (who cares?); the much larger and deeply troubling issue is that at the height of the NHL playoffs the hockey MSM here don’t think there’s anything hockey worth writing about. We also have a certain farm club just up the road making more notable postseason noise.

One of our readers informed us yesterday that on his radio show Thursday morning no less than Tony Kornheiser complained of WaPost’s lack of NHL postseason coverage! Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.

Some months ago an OFB colleague expressed to me his concern about our site’s content come summer. A darkness over the ice necessarily meant lights out on writing ideas, no? I had to laugh. The entire month of June is Christmas Eve for Draftgeeks. Anything worth monitoring come July 1? A week or so later, the reigning MVP of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League will arrive in Washington to take part in the Caps’ summer rookie camp. And he will be joined by that league’s leading scorer from this past season as well as numerous, newly signed collegians of promise. I’m actually thinking of enrolling in Berlitz classes for French.

We have interviews scheduled for the summer that are simply impossible to carry off in-season.

More basically, aren’t the most inspired love letters composed in the absence of the beloved? Soldiers to their girls back home, campus sweethearts separated by summer jobs and vexing geography. The summer, when we’re separated from our mistress the ice, is the birthchild of a renewed yearning. Ironically, the oven-oppressive heat and humidity that plagues our region throughout July and August insulates me in inspiring thoughts of better, colder hours more pleasantly passed. I actually walk to my Metro station, dripping, on those mornings and imagine myself training for the Iditarod.

What manner of lover’s note do we in Hockey D.C. receive from 15th St. and its ilk in summer?

A Dear John.