On Frozen Blog

You may have noticed while watching Sunday’s game that world-class skaters had difficulty skating, frequently falling without contact; that the puck persistently insisted on sticking to its position on the playing surface, despite sticks’ efforts to move it; and that play overall was distinctly uninspiring. Such is the hockey game that follows rather near a hard slate of hardwood action.

Sunday’s hockey matinee between the Caps and Lightning followed not one but two hoops’ games Saturday — Georgetown and Duke in the afternoon and the Wizards and somebody else that evening. The changeover back to ice for Sunday wasn’t as abbreviated as if the Caps were playing in the evening following a basketball matinee, but Verizon Center staff had to get the hoops court down fairly soon after Friday night’s Caps-Cats’ tilt to accommodate basketball’s early Saturday start. The court was long atop the ice for an extended stretch Saturday, and its removal relatively hurried for Sunday’s 3:00 faceoff.

Verizon Center, given the volume of activity it hosts, won’t offer the Caps an elite sheet of ice, or anything close to it, in our lifetimes, but on Friday night, as temperatures outside plummeted precipitously, the puck moved and players could skate. It was as cold in the rink as I can ever remember, and the temperature outside had a lot to do with it. Ottawa-native Lisa Hillary, layered for the Iditarod, complained to me about the rink’s chilliness during an intermission.

The play on Sunday was depressingly dull, and you could see both teams make regular use of long stretch passes in an acknowledgment that crisp and creative playmaking was virtually an impossibility.

My new media colleague Ed Frankovic of Baltimore radio WNST coined a clever phrase to capture the dull and compromised state of the sheet affairs. Alluding to President Obama’s attendance at Verizon Center Saturday for the Georgetown game, and wryly noting that he’s now twice visited for hoops while forsaking the building’s most impressive tenant, Ed labeled the sheet “Obama ice.”

The term of course carries an amusing irony, and it quickly was seized upon by our new media mates all up and down blogger’s row as players regularly overskated pucks or fell down for no good reason. All the players struggled with the conditions. The public option for those watching the play would have been to contest the game on the Sculpture Gardens ice rink at the National Gallery of Art.

You have to think that had D.C. not had the snow and frosty air it did this weekend and instead a thawing day in the 50s — which isn’t all that uncommon — we might have seen a truly injurious sheet of ice on Sunday.

Southeast Snoozing

Something else I noticed about Verizon Center this past weekend: how quiet the soldout crowds were. Then I thought back to the atmosphere in place when Philadelphia visited for a 3:00 Sunday start earlier in the month, and that for Detroit two nights later. And then I thought about the likely atmosphere in place for this Sunday’s early (noon) start for the Pens. And I came to a simple, irrefutable conclusion: Washington loves its hockey team and sells out all its games, but it doesn’t much get amped up for visits from Southleast ‘rivals.’ And how could they, relative to the attraction associated with Washington’s longstanding and geographically organic rivals?

Consider that history was on the line on Sunday, too, and still the building sounded like a big-city library for much of the afternoon. We may not have to wait much longer for a much-needed, long overdue remedy in this matter — it’ll be inaugurated if Ilya Kovalchuk is dealt by the Thrashers.

Dancing not with your date but rather the prettiest girl

This Friday Comcast Sportsnet was scheduled to broadcast the Caps-Thrashers’ game on its visual equivalent of Wayne’s World, the indecipherable CSN+, while the Wizards enjoyed the high definition home of the main channel. But yesterday the outlet announced a welcome switch-a-roo. Now the Caps will actually be seen on Friday. Expect more such switches down the stretch. Serious winning breeds these kind of prerogatives.

On Snow Wimps and Winter Wussies

Just about every office in town I’m sure featured what mine did on Monday: a small but vocal minority of working Washingtonians feigning strife and trial by virtue of a grand total of two significant snowstorms having falling upon the region. In other words, winter being winter. Another storm may hit us this coming weekend. If it does, I’ll be smiling all the way through it, again.

One of the great attractions of living in Washington is its diversity of seasonal weather — we actually get four distinct seasons here. But for much of the past 15 years or so winters here have eunuch-ed into a sort of mildly harsh autumn. A couple of them transpired basically snow-less. Where’s the fun in that?

I love the rejuvinative warmth of the Ocean City sun in summer, and body surfing in its cooling tides, but I also thrill at the beauty Old Man Winter delivers with a life-quieting blanket of snow. Yesterday morning I bundled up in my navy pea coat and walked my customary 10 minutes to my commuting train through suburban woods. There was a delightful and novel crunch of fresh snow under my feet. There was a brilliant sun rising Monday morning, and its shine cast a spectacular and uplifting glow on the freshly fallen snow, hardened by a deep freeze overnight. I loved seeing the snow cling in impressive abundance on bared tree limbs, too, which towered high in the woods I passed through. This is a most novel sight in our region.

But I treasured this frosty scene especially on a morning made more novel by a historic winning streak by the local hockey team. Washington seemed especially a hockey town to me in these precious minutes of my morning walk. I didn’t want an inch less of snow, a degree more of mercury. Bracing winter air filled my lungs as I marched through the whitened landscape, thinking about hockey history. Let us win all this week’s games too, and let it snow! let it snow! anew right before the Penguins arrive on Sunday. We’ll be back in shorts and red t-shirts for the playoffs before you know it.

I think it doubtful that Nature whitened our region and froze it thoroughly to honor the Capitals’ winning streak this past weekend, although for a few minutes Monday morning it felt that way to me.