On Frozen Blog

Saturday’s concluding scrimmage to Rookie Camp 2007 drew far and away the largest Kettler crowd of the week, and the faithful were rewarded with the week’s most entertaining outing. Blue bested White 7-3 in a full three periods of stopped clock, penalties called feast for the puck famined. Joe Finley went down with a minor injury midway through the game, but that represented, as best as I could tell, the extent of the triage this week. That’s always good news.

In lieu of a scrimmage summary (so many of you were there to see it with your own eyes anyway), and because Mike Vogel has his usual outstanding reckoning of it, I thought today I’d pen a week’s worth of larger impressions.

* Hockey Washington was the big winner this week. Kettler Capitals made its debut in hosting a camp of any sorts, and it graded out great from my vantage. The days of this team competing in somewhat nomadic fashion with summer camps are history. When I first learned that Kettler was going to be a multi-sheet facility and training home for the team, I thought about the opportunity the organization could have for hosting a week-long event like the old Traverse City, Michigan, rookie camps that hosted a handful of NHL teams and bred a great competitive atmosphere. That could happen here eventually — imagine the allure for all those young prospects from hockey’s rural frontiers for spending a week in the U.S. capital — but we’re also well served for our hockey fixes with what we saw this week. How great, too, was it for the facility’s ice staff to get in place the new logo on the sheets in time for camp, and for all the skaters to be outfitted in the overhauled look of the team? I wish I had a quarter for every camp patron I saw walking out of the Kettler pro shop bearing the new Caps’ colors and logo either on their heads or chests, and often both.

* In a very real sense rookie camps are parties for an NHL team’s scouts. There can be no more direct way to evaluate the cumulative labor of a team’s North American and European scouts than to pile dozens of the recent draft selections onto a rink, toss them a puck, and have them go at it every night. I would argue that the party our scouts and team management threw this week at Kettler ranked up there with best of the league’s 30 teams. And Mike Vogel agrees:

“I just checked my notes from the Capitals’ 2003 summer camp at Piney Orchard. There were 22 players in attendance that summer, compared to 42 this season. Only 13 of those 22 players in 2003 were Capitals draftees, and the most notable attendees were Steve Eminger, Boyd Gordon and Eric Fehr. This year’s camp featured 30 Caps draftees out of the 42 players in attendance, and included five first-round and four second-round choices.”

And I’d agree with Vogs that there is today “arguably as much young talent as has been in the system at any time in the team’s history.”

* Saturday’s was the first and only scrimmage I didn’t see owner Ted Leonsis attend. He watched every second of every other one. It bears repreating, particularly in a town of somewhat unpopular, extortionist sports team owners, that our owner is a hockey fanatic. The OFB team also had an opportunity to meet and chat with Zachary Leonsis, who’s headed to Penn for his freshman year next year. Zach shared with us some amazing stories about Alexander Ovechkin’s driveway hoops abilities and general athletic prowess.

* Our print press in town I thought offered up some terrific coverage of camp, but I was surprised that a facility and an event lending itself especially to television footage drew very little in the way of cameras and correspondents. Al Koken and Joe Reekie were camp fixtures, but of local sports anchors, I was at pains to spot a single one during a single scrimmage. In particular, I wondered at the AWOL absence of the Regional Queen of Local Sports.

* Remember Mr. Leonsis’ expressed wish for a durable synergy taking hold between the hockey communities in D.C. and Hershey, Pa.? I saw more of that this week. Bruce Boudreau worked the benches and helped evaluate players every day. I met up with Bears’ man about all things communications John Walton, and Tim Leone of the Patriot News actually spent a portion of his summer vacation at Kettler. A hockey reporter getting away from his day job at the rink by coming to a rink, in July. Sounds like a pro to me.

* I asked Vogs to share with me five names of campers who really caught his eye this week. He went with Karl Alzner, Francois Bouchard, Michal Neuvirth, Sami Lepisto, and Nicklas Backstrom. Mine: Joe Finley, Nicklas Backstrom, Sami Lepisto, Mathieu Perreault, and Francois Bouchard. Tarik today also shows Francois Bouchard some love.

* I think from every rookie camp you want two separate but equally compelling storylines: breakout/head-turning/buzz-generating efforts from guys who a half season or so earlier were under everybody’s radar, and we got that this week from the likes of Francois Bouchard, Mathieu Perreault, Joe Finley, and Sami Lepisto. If not others. But you also are looking for performances that are so strong that they evoke forecasts for cracking the big club’s roster come September, and here too I think we saw that with Bouchard, Karl Alzner, and Lepisto.