On Frozen Blog

This week I have as part of my city-to-suburban-home commute a wonderful walk through some snowy suburban woods. I arrived at the woods late last night fresh off a thrilling and well played hockey game downtown, featuring two quality hockey clubs, aware that much-need holiday leisure was setting in at last. It was a walk of merely two hockey shifts’ length, but pedestrian traffic had forged a knee-high, snaking tunnel through the woods, and I delighted in the sound of snow crunching under my feet and bracing chill filling my lungs. Hockey conditions. Washington this Christmas has a first-place hockey club, the best team in town, and a winter wonderland within which to experience it. So I already have my Christmas present.

Last night’s was such a speed game — it was beautiful to watch. North-south attacks and, on Buffalo’s part particularly, furious forechecking, which is a byproduct of their outstanding speed. Brendan Morrison noted in the postgame that the Sabres represented just about the best skating club the Caps face all season. I thought both clubs well utilized trailers and weakside options off of speed rushes and high-octane attacks. If you enjoyed the pace and creativity with last night’s game hopefully you DVR’d it, because next up, on Saturday, is New Jersey. That will be a lateral attack affair. As it ever is.

• The Hershey Bears are on holiday break, and so a healthy contingent of the Hershey hockey community was on hand last night. I shared with them my concern about the likely quality of Verizon Center’s ice sheet, seeing as how the Georgetown Hoyas dribbled on it in the afternoon. But by the standards we’ve become accustomed to when hoops preceeds puck in the same day, last night’s sheet, I thought, appeared to be of inexplicable integrity. Certainly the Caps’ performance in the opening 20 minutes suggested they had no difficulties with it — the Ovi-Backstrom-Semin line especially.
• Bruce Boudreau loved his team’s first period as much as the fans did, and he loved his first line’s play precisely because of its attack ethos. You didn’t see overpassing from them in the offensive zone, what the coach terms “being too cute.” Later one, they reverted a bit, and he broke them up. It’s tantalizing to imagine what that line and this team could do in the postseason were his top three guns to perform reliably together as they did in Wednesday night’s opening 20 minutes.
• Mike Green stated plainly in the postgame that he regarded Wednesday’s opening 20 minutes a direct carryover from the third period in Edmonton Saturday night. The periods were similar in shotcounts and overall dominance.
• Brendan Morrison’s goal. Oh. My. God. In the postgame he pointed out that he believed himself to be at such a severe angle on the play that had no recourse but to Magic-Johnson it between his legs. He also joked that he hadn’t scored a goal like that in seventeen years. I’d like to be able to score a goal like that in beer league hockey just once, let alone every seventeen years. I wondered if any Washington Capital had ever scored such a scriptedly virtuoso tally before, ever. I mean Bonzai scored his share of jaw-droppers, and Ovi’s ‘The Goal,’ while it deserves designation as immortal, was wholly improvisational. What was so impressive about BMo’s strike — besides the fact that he bested perhaps the best goalie in all of hockey at the moment — was that he sublimely executed precisely what he intended to. I asked Bruce Boudreau if he’d ever scored such a goal, and at first he claimed not to remember (as if you could forget) but then fell back on “I was a meat and potatos guy.” The head coach was well aware that everyone in the press had already seen replays of the goal a few times, but nonetheless he urged us to watch it again to more fully appreciate it. And so we shall.: