On Tuesday, Caps' owner Ted Leonsis conducted a bit of a new season tour of media, and his message was static-free and stout: 2007-08 is the year for the organization and its fans to raise their expectations high -- postseason high. "The rebuild is over," Leonsis proclaimed to Joseph White of the Associated Press, adding that during the offseason "we improved a lot . . . and a lot of teams around us didn't."

That's throwing down the gauntlet. For what it's worth, while we haven't completed an overview of the offseasons of 29 other NHL clubs, we see it a lot like Leonsis does, especially in the Southeast division.

White's preview of the Caps' season is commendable on many fronts. It outlines Alexander Ovechkin's progression from a stand-alone star on a talent-starved club immediately following the lockout to his status this autumn as a leading figure now surrounded by a distinctly talented supporting cast: Michal Nylander, Alexander Semin, Viktor Kozlov, Tom Poti, Nicklas Backstrom, Chris Clark.

White also broke some news Tuesday: the Caps' payroll for this season appears lodged at $42 million -- higher than conventional kneejerk forecasts (you know the ones, suggesting that the club would once again anchor the payroll floor for the league). At this salary level, Leonsis noted, the Caps possess what he termed "optionality," or manueverability in-season to remedy roster needs.

" . . . we could be a really good team. . . . We're under the cap. We have a lot of assets. I could see us during the season making trades. We've reached that point now where we're a team going up with good cap management. We have 'optionality.' We're very well-positioned in the new NHL. "If you look for the most part, the teams who got really, really good were [first] really, really bad. That's the nature of professional sports. It's a very difficult decision to say, 'We have to get bad, we have to strip this house down to its foundation and rebuild it to be great.'"

If we had a gripe with White's work on Tuesday, it'd center on his rote recitation of the overplayed "the-stands-are-empty-for-hockey-in-D.C." refrain. Nothing wrong with the observation, so long as you paint a full contextual landscape for it: for nearly 10 years Leonsis has run his team in a city with a dismissive-to-hockey media. Sneering columnists, ignorant radio jocks (bar one, who happens to be Canadian), superficial sports anchors, and blissfully balance-free sports page editors. How do you market a product, even in playoff-qualifying times, when virtually every media shop in town acts as if you don't exist? One approach is to go beyond the local traditional media and find other outlets to spread the word. Tuesday also saw the publication of an interview with Leonsis by local blog DCist. He discussed his film Nanking, reiterated the Capitals' salary cap strategy, and again set the playoffs as the team's 2007-08 goal. He also addressed the alleged -- and subsequently discredited -- report recently of a scuffle between Alex Ovechkin and Russian agent Gennady Ushakov:

"As with any international superstar, there will always be speculation and innuendo written, but with media ethics today, I tend to disregard most of what I read and deal with what I know to be fact."

Leonsis' interviews with the AP and DCist speak to, as he put it, the "need to go direct to consumers and bypass media filters as much as we can."

We at OFB, unsurprisingly, couldn't agree more. Just as fortunes for the Caps appear to be changing for the better on the ice, so too are they off it: in broadened, better, and MSM-challenging coverage.