On Frozen Blog

That was the sentiment expressed by one of our readers early last evening, and it seems to us to capture Thursday’s wild ride and community-consuming euphoria rather perfectly and wonderfully.

Another way of characterizing the most common reaction shared with us: unbridled, unmitigated glee. Thursday’s news for Caps’ fans was, it seems to us, so much more than mere word of the hockey All Star re-upping.

We in HockeyWashington have spent a fair bit of time this hockey season enduring slurs and slights from commentators in larger, more established, and more prestigious markets, who fed on Alexander Ovechkin’s looming restricted free agency as an occasion to belittle our town anew. Well of course he’d want to bolt D.C. at first chance, they implied. He deserves to be in a serious hockey market! Did big-name commentators say this of Joe Thornton when he was shipped to San Jose? Anyway, the Capitals’ owner yesterday replied to the slurs, with nine-figure emphasis: “Oh yeah? Go ahead and negotiate with our star . . . in 2021.”

Thursday’s wild ride actually began for us some months ago, when SovetskySports’ Dmitry Chesnokov first came to us with particulars pertaining to negotiations between Ovechkin and the Caps. Chesnokov, a lawyer by day, has for some time known the Ovechkin family. Intermittently he would confide in me about the negotiations, but at no point did OFB ever consider publishing any of it. We just weren’t interested in chronicling the give and take in contract negotiations. What’s substantive and productive about that? I did tell Dmitry that I’d be interested in his insider’s account if things heated up and he had, say, an imminent deal to discuss.

Which brings us to this past Wednesday night at Verizon Center. I was there, in my usual seat, my laptop powered up. OFB readers awoke Thursday morning to my file on Peter Bondra, but no substance pertaining to a terrific game between the Caps and Colorado. That’s because, thanks to Dmitry, I saw precious little of it. Late in period one he arrived in press row, behind me, and initiated what I then regarded as weird — and loud — pestering.

His eyes were wide, his arms were waving wildly every time I turned to acknowledge his calls, and he wouldn’t relent. With Russian subtlety he implored me to leave my seat to come up and chat with him. Twice, while bearing an expression of exasperation in catching his stare, I pointed at my laptop screen to try and convey to him that I was immersed in following a fairly important hockey game. At last he left his seat and came up behind mine.

“You need to follow me outside,” he ordered. “Now.”

Near the press elevator and away from all media others, he dropped the bomb on me.

“How does six years and fifty four million sound to you?” he asked, smiling.

“Ovechkin and his family are going to Kettler tomorrow afternoon, at 1:30. They are taking a lawyer with them. They are going to sign the contract.”

As I digested this intrigue I thought back to Dmitry’s animated press row antics. They were, in hindsight, restrained. Were I the holder of this news, and were I seeking to share it with him, I’d have rushed into press row naked and with my hair on fire.

“This,” I told Dmitry, “I can use.”

I know Dmitry as a close friend and I respect his work as a journalist so much that I never question his sources. Except this time.

“Source?” I asked.

His answer was satisfactory, in a dandy sense. So what next, I asked?

“We publish jointly at 4:00 tomorrow,” he told me.

Four was when Dmitry had been told to expect the signing party to break up, and to expect a cell phone call from a very wealthy Russian immigrant family. There was also this: Thursday was the Caps’ annual meet-and-greet for season ticket holders and players. If I’d had any reservations about the veracity of Dmitry’s claims, the notion of the team owner standing before thousands of customers and announcing the best news the organization has ever known then, seemed to me an exclamation point in persuasion.

This development occasioned a fun new task for me back at my laptop: compose a brief but newsworthy email to my bloggermates.

“Remember that story I suggested would be good fun for us to break?” I began. “How does tomorrow at 4:00 sound?”

With play going on Verizon Center ice below me but me now wholly oblivious to it, I also sent email to Tim Leone of the Patriot News: “We might have something to perk up your Thursday afternoon.”

Now seated next to one another for the remainder of the game, Dmitry and I initiated what would come to consume virtually every second of our lives over the next 18 hours: communications verbal, electronic, cell phone-driven, excruciatingly detailed, all of it pulsating and pulse-racing. This was no Morning Cup-a-Joe I was poised to publish.

“Nobody else knows,” Dmitry kept reminding me.

I don’t quite know how to quantify the volume of communications Dmitry and I engaged in Wednesday night and throughout Thursday, except to say that a conservative tally of email messages alone might arrive at 124 million. I’ve saved nearly all of them, as a very personal chronology and e-shrine to our friendship persevering and growing under high-stakes duress. We moved forward with our publishing plan in excruciatingly deliberate fashion. Think whatever you want about new media in hockey and its insurgency campaign and its limits, weaknesses, and warts; Dmitry and I Thursday agonized under old media standards of propriety, protocol, and accuracy — and most of all, a sense of doing honorably by a Capitals’ organization who’d treated both of us as if we were National Press Club honorees since the 2006-07 season.

In a very real sense Dmitry and I lost contact with what we’d previously known as our typical Washington professional world by day and hockey passion pursuing by breakfast, lunch hour, and evening. We were the custodians of one of the biggest stories in SportsWashington. It was all-consuming, nerve-numbing, and most especially surreal. My bloggermates were already under gag orders even from their spouses. Early Thursday Dmitry became a part of OFB’s e-inner-circle, and without drama he quickly established a KGB kind of discipline and stealth to our endeavor.

Late Thursday morning Dmitry’s editors in Moscow — fully apprised of the news — began pressuring him to run with the story early. Their strategy was to have OFB drop a blogger’s bomb stateside while RDS editors in Montreal, in another pre-arranged script, ignited Canadians. Dmitry was this circus’ ringmaster, coordinating real-time communications Thursday between Washington, Montreal, and Moscow. But Moscow’s demands, I pleaded to Dmitry, were too excessive for us to accommodate.

“What if the lawyer doesn’t like what he sees on contract page 56,” I wrote in email no. 7,209. “Or, what if Ovechkin simply wants to sleep another night on his proposed mega-deal?”

The full Ovechkin clan was in Washington for a big family event, Dmitry informed me, and it had nothing to do with the Colorado Avalanche.

Still I lobbied hard to stick by our original timeframe, 4:00, no matter how fait accompli this mega-matter was. To me it was metaphysically unethical to run a story pegged on an afternoon contract signing while afternoon was just commencing. I began to appreciate Russian journalism’s . . . fast and loose fatalism. And resent it. But there was no issue with Dmitry’s sense of propriety — he wanted to wait on the Ovechkin cell phone call. But his editors were bearing down on him. Canada, too, was getting squirmy.

“RDS,” Dmitry wrote me in email, “is going to run with it at any moment.”

Next we agonized over outreach to the Caps. New media insurrectionists, we didn’t want to tip our hand to the team’s media pros, who while being world leaders in supporting the New Media Cause, also are operating in the current media climate, and understandably would prefer to hear our news from, say, Michael Farber or Bob McKenzie. But there was no way we were going public without alerting Nate Ewell in advance.

Near 2:45, with Dmitry’s support, I made the call to reach out to my friend Mike Vogel. Mike had introduced me to Dmitry in May 2007, when he and I were writing for the Caps at the Worlds in Moscow. I had this hot tamale in my lap, and I desperately needed a pro’s guidance with its digestion. Problem was, the pro I always reach out to was in this instance a stakeholder in the matter. I wanted a great scoop, but there’s no scoop sexy enough for me to infringe upon or bruise a friendship over.

I laid it all out for Mike as we had it, term and dough, and I made a point of reminding him, as I always do, what my expectations are in bringing up business with a friend: I don’t place him in any awkward position and he in return reminds me how this hockey business is overpopulated with extraordinarily quality human beings. There was no expectation on my end of confirmation from him. I wanted his guidance in keeping harm from the blog, and I wanted anything else he’d offer as friendly advice. To no surprise, Mike gave me just what I needed — his sober, supportive thoughts.

“Call Nate,” he concluded.

A little before 3:00 I left voicemail for Nate, and over the course of the next 30 minutes Vogs took the lead in relaying messages his and Nate’s to me. There were, clearly, a lot of busy people in Caps’ Communications yesterday afternoon. Officially, the Caps instructed me “to sit on the story” a bit. It was an eminently reasonable request.

Which soon thereafter I ignored.

RDS went live, OFB did as well, Moscow sent us its link, and this off-day Thursday for the Caps became a bit more lively.