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I’ve felt a bit like the Steve Eminger of blogging the past week — a lot of action happening about the Caps, and I was a distant witness to it. It started late last Monday afternoon, when I was enduring Braveheart-like body treatment by TSA out at Dulles Airport. One final glimpse of my blackberry before boarding brought me news of Brian Sutherby being dealt. From that moment on I had a thick sense that that was merely an opening salvo by team management during the holiday week.

Resting thumbs: I was able to maintain contact with my OFB colleagues while abroad — even ocassionally during Dublin happy hours — and punch out a few blog files via a reasonably reliable hand-held. But by the weekend I was ready for a thumbs-for-ankles exchange with Alexander Semin.

After Wednesday night’s annihilation at the hands of Atlanta I immediately messaged my bloggermates and expressed my conviction that we needed to be poised to respond to a Thursday morning news advisory, early, and likely followup presser related to Glen Hanlon. We aren’t the most mobile of bloggers these days: one has a week-old infant at home; another is a newlywed (seen outdoors these days only for procurement of life’s basics); another is rather well along in a pregnancy (not EmptyMaybe); and I was some 5,000 miles from Kettler. I didn’t imagine anyone able to bolt for Kettler on the holiday at a moment’s notice; mostly I wanted one set of eyes on email.

For a couple of weeks before I left I struggled with restraining from blogging tidbits I’d picked up related to the state of affairs in the Caps’ room. I had only one Cap relay, on background, his sense of Hanlon having lost the team “a while ago,” and further, that his vantage, he felt confident, was shared by “a handful” of teammates. Based on when this information arrived, I inferred that “a while ago” alluded perhaps back even to October. But background means background. But also, I personally would have needed a minimum of three Caps testifying to such views, and even then, I’d have struggled weighing the news value vs. mere tawdry tidbit angle. The last thing this team needed this month was more misery aired out, in new or old media.

To some extent, this is now an academic discussion, except in this sense: did Caps’ management react to a clearly deteriorating situation in a timely enough fashion? Frankly, I’m less concerned about playoff viability now or in the weeks ahead and more interested in knowing how effective and reliable communications channels are between players and management, so that more such situations can be avoided. Bags over heads (grateful I was to be 5,000 miles away from that) and unprecedented and disspiriting chanting in the stands should never be viable. Ron Wilson’s final year in D.C. doesn’t suggest there was such an effective communications stream then.

A bit more fair-game background: as things worsened in the standings and in the mood around the team I became a part of a communications flow of conspicuous support for Bruce Boudreau as Glen Hanlon’s replacement. This morning I feel sheepish for not recognizing how spot-on that sentiment was. It isn’t just that he’s gotten out of the gate with guns blazing a bit. John Walton’s Open Letter to the Caps Nation was a tour-de-force summary of Boudreau’s sterling qualifications.

The guy’s a winner, a big-time winner, and he has a presence about any team he coaches. I first got to speak to him up in Portland, Maine, last season, while following the Bears on a long weekend roadtrip. I remember sitting in a dark and dank Cumberland County Civic Center one Saturday morning and seeing Boudreau seated way up high there, near the roof, just a speck in the dark stands, while his very winning team ran its paces far down below. He hardly ever moved or spoke. Assistant Coach Bob Woods ran the drills. Wouldn’t a team tired from a tough game the night before let up just a little in mid-winter at 10:00 a.m. gameday skate in a cold, rundown New England outpost? Nope. That team I saw skate that morning was a well-oiled machine. Its members knew their leader was seated somewhere, taking it all in. They knew what he expected of them. That was the first moment I thought about Bruce Boudreau potentially having a starring role in the Caps’ organization.