So . . . About That Goaltending
I wasn't the most popular fella in these parts when, in the middle of summer, I offered the opinion that losing out on Cristobal Huet and settling for Jose Theodore didn't exactly inspire dreams of circling around Verizon Center ice with Lord Stanley raised high. To be fair: the Caps pursued Huet with vigor, and lost out having made a very good-faith effort to re-up with him.
But at the time I recall the Capitals' fanbase responding to the disappointment with something approaching a collective "Oh my f*in god."
For good reason.
It's not that Cristobal Huet was the second coming of Johnny Bower; it's that in a Caps' sweater, playing behind the Caps' young D corps last spring, there was chemistry . . . and conspicuous success.
This morning I'm not interested in going back and playing what-ifs; it's futile and pointless. I will remind though that we are where we are (sh*tsville between the pipes?) because the one area this organization wasn't prepared for in its rebuild was with a succession plan for Olaf Kolzig. I said that in July and I felt that -- thoroughly -- on Friday night.
Now, on Saturday, a team with more than one good shooter arrives at Verizon Center.
There is one other important area of the past to acknowledge. Two, actually. The Capitals would not have come close to winning the Southeast and qualifying for the playoffs last season were it not for the stretch-run heroics of Huet. That's fact. Second, something sublime occurred between Huet and his new defensemen in D.C. -- something stunning truly took root; a real reliable chemistry of awareness and predictability of rebound and positioning, allowing for the Caps' young corps to look more mature and developed than they actually were. That too is fact.
When that dynamic was extinguished, something important was lost. It matters not what you think of Huet as an individual talent, then or today. What matters is what he did while in a Caps' sweater.
Friday night was, if you want to view it as such, just one game (against a very weak Atlanta team). Or, it was the 445th of Jose Theodore's career, of which he's won 183.
Here's what's particularly scary about Friday night in Atlanta: Ilya Kovalchuk actually didn't play that well in the season opener for both teams; the Caps are going to see far more lethal from him this season.
Also, this: that Atlanta team, the one that hung seven on the 'Cup contenders,' went 1-6 in the preseason and was slated to finish anywhere between 30th and 27th in the league's standings. Bryan Little? And there's more: five more times this season the Thrashers will start Kari Lehtonen in net against the Caps, and no matter who starts in net at the other end there will be a gross mismatch in talent between the pipes. In hockey, that's a daunting evening factor.
Credit Joe Beninati, calling the game on Comcast last night, for acknowledging on the air that Theodore's preseason play was sub-par as well. And it wasn't particularly comforting to see him storm off the ice at his yanking and march straight into the dressing room. Later, he returned to the team bench.
Whatever you thought of Theodore's career up to this summer, and even if you thought the Caps susceptible of believing too much their preseason press clippings, in your wildest imagination, did you conceive of a second-period yanking in the debut, and against Atlanta?
Early Friday afternoon there was a thread started on the Caps' message boards themed on Brent Johnson emerging as the Caps' no. 1 netminder this season. For most of the afternoon, it was met with ridicule. From the vantage of salary, it does seem ludicrous. And yet from the vantage of pure technical ability, it's not. Jose Theodore has an abundance more raw talent than BJ; still, that BJ stopped the bleeding and was in position to be the winning netminder in the third period Friday night (a converted AO penalty shot might have made that quite feasible) casts a considerably dark cloud over the home opener.
A concluding thought, one that animated my distress back in early July: goalies in their 30s with a decade-plus legacy of inconsistency don't appreciably change their games by virtue of new contracts in appealing surroundings. However we might wish it so.
Be afraid, friends, be very afraid. No matter how electrifying a team's left wings, the one constant in hockey is that the most important position on the ice remains between the pipes.
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