Developing a "Killer Instinct"?
By now you realize that the Caps secured their 70th point last night, equaling their totals for last two seasons, with still 15 games remaining. The rebuild is indeed over.
This morning the Caps' communications staff sent out its customary morning-after notes and story links, and in it observed that the team's last three wins have been achieved comfortably (20-5 is the goals tally in the past four games): "Not sweating out every win has been a nice luxury for the team as it chases its first playoff berth since 2003, and could be a sign that it has developed a killer instinct," the email noted.
I extolled the virtues of the NHL Network when I first encountered it on my cable system last autumn. There is there now a slate of new promotional commercials every bit as endearing as the ones we reveled in last month. Anyway, very late Monday night and early into Tuesday, with so few league games scheduled last night, the network was a bathhouse of schadenfreude for Capitals' fans as goal after Capital goal was replayed and richly remarked upon by the network's studio personalities. I lost a good bit of sleep so schadenfreuding, and I was left with the impression that over the next 10 years we in D.C. could see a whole lot more of such nights on that outlet.
I spent more than 15 minutes talking to Matt Cooke after the game Monday night -- everyone else media was hording around Ovechkin, understandably. This is a guy who's spent the entirety of his not-so-short NHL career in a very winning NHL organization. He's been here in D.C. about 90 hours. He was Monday night -- in no uncertain terms -- effusive in his praises for the talent level and human being quality of NHL players newly surrounding him.
I won't put words in his mouth, but he all but forecasted more beatdowns, this season, of Monday night's variety. It was Cooke who told me, "Had Toskala not been so good (Saturday), it could have been 6-0 in the first then." He also told me this: "There's not one part of [Boudreau's] system here that was in Vancouver. Not one." I'm telling you, I've talked to a lot of NHLers the past two years, and I've never heard a guy with this credibility so dispassionately stake so stark a forecast. He's still somewhat a Capitals' outsider, but he's been inside long enough to see what he's surrounded by. And it impresses him mightily.
If Alexander Ovechkin earns a Hart Trophy this year, we'll be able to point to some ungodly and perhaps vote-swaying performances by him against some of the league's flagship franchises: versus Montreal on January 31, which featured the Ovechkin hat trick, and Monday night's 5-point performance against another Original Six squad, on national television. The Caps travel to Chicago on March 19, where there's a serious revival taking place, and where there's an excellent chance of another set of 21,000-plus sets of eyes on him. The Hawks have had like six crowds of over 21,000 in their rink this season. The larger the challenge, the larger Ovechkin seems to perform, and sharing a sheet of ice that night with the revitalized Hawks and their young guns Kane and Toews ought to get his Russian Machine oil pumping.
I'm now of the opinion that when hockey greatness transpires at Verizon Center the two newspapers in town -- all other things sports news otherwise being normal -- will splash the news in impressive technicolor photojournalism, as we see this morning. That's a marvelous media maturation directed at what was, say just three months ago, the afterthought sport in town.
And we know who's leading the Revolution.
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