The Capitals last night, with Tom Poti still absent with injury, offered a marked improvement in their own end in a shootout loss in St. Louis. Sorta. In their last six games the Capitals have surrendered 26 goals. Saturday night’s defensive effort is tempered appreciably from this blogger’s vantage insomuch as Jose Theodore faced three clear-cut breakaways — all of which he thwarted; the Blues easily could have put up another 5- or 6-spot on the Caps. The trending on the back end has been, to put it charitably, disquieting. McPhee’s leaving the blueline as comprised would seem to be entering the postseason playing with something other than house money.

I wonder about the Caps in the pivot largely because of Brendan Morrison’s alarmingly declining production. In 62 games thus far BMo has 11 goals and 23 assists while skating a responsible +19. But 10 of his 11 goals he scored before Christmas; in 25 games since then he’s tallied just once, joined by eight assists. He’s 34. Maybe the three weeks off bring him rest and rejuvenation and a return to his autumn form. Again, though, such wishful thinking would on George McPhee’s part represent his making a mighty wager.

For NHL fans, the NHL trade deadline is rivaled only by the Entry Draft in intrigue. When it comes to deadline player movements, fans tend to speculate in relatively simplistic fashion — who’s out of the postseason chase, and therefore likely to purge the roster of expensive parts? And, who across the league is not in genuine Cup contention and has looming unrestricted free agents, for whom they’d likely be interested in getting something in return? General managers, too, ponder these questions, but in observing McPhee here for more than 10 years I’ve come to the conclusion that his scouts and he are moved to move around deadline time in pursuit simply of players who’ve stood out to them with their play, irrespective of contract status or their team’s position in the standings.

McPhee moved Jan Bulis and Richard Zednik and a first round pick to Montreal at the deadline in 2001 because McPhee really liked Dainius Zubrus and Trevor Linden. As prelude to the team’s only appearance in the Stanley Cup finals in 1998, McPhee got good reports on Esa Tikkanen and Brian Bellows and moved to nab both. And of course he made bold moves at the deadline in 2008, grabbing Cristobal Huet, Matt Cooke, and Sergei Fedorov — acquisitions no one expected but ones premised on deft work by his pro scouts.

Late last winter, as the trade deadline approached, McPhee stood pat and watched Pittsburgh make bold moves — most particularly for right wing Bill Guerin — that clearly aided the Penguins’ Stanley Cup run. As game 7 of the Eastern Conference semi-finals last May ended here is such sour fashion, one of the leading post mortem questions for Washington’s media and fans was: to the extent that the Capitals were interested in getting Guerin, how close did they come?

While rosters now are frozen, chit-chat between NHL GMs over the next 15 days isn’t. Most or all of them will be congregated in Vancouver. Some of them will have dinner together. A few post-Olympic-games beers. Some very interesting conversations, you have to think. The most intriguing aspect in McPhee’s deliberations over the next 15 or so days would have to be the balance he’d have to strike between making potential roster-improving moves weighed against tinkering too significantly with a chemistry that’s produced a league-best 90 points at the break. The Capitals today are a terrific hockey club, a tier I Cup contender. They are, like everyone else in that realm, also flawed.

McPhee has a quiver full of sharpened weaponry for his Olympics break strategizing — a significant volume of promising prospect assets and salary cap space. He’d tinker from a clear position of strength, and with a reputation over the past 5 years or so as ranking among the league’s savviest of roster manipulators. Should he buy in at the poker table in Vancouver the stakes will never be greater.

Young core players continue to mature into global-elite talents. Additional promising talent, joined by a smattering of savvy free agent and trade acquisitions, fills out a formidable skating roster. There is additionally a surplus of prime talent in net. My friends in the Red Army, I am here this morning to report to you that the state of the Capitals’ Union is Stanley Cup contender-favorite strong!

A lead storyline in this Capitals’ season is the change in the team’s leadership. In December, Chris Clark was dealt to Columbus, his captaincy awarded to Alexander Ovechkin. Since his drafting in 2004, Ovechkin has been the face of hockey in Washington, and it’s a profile that has catapulted hockey’s standing to the fore of Washington’s sports scene. As such, his captaincy was an inevitability, but it also represents an earned leadership, hardly hastily bestowed, and one certain to endure the next decade-plus — a leadership stability the Caps haven’t known since Dale Hunter departed.

A year ago, fellow soldiers, the Capitals enjoyed their finest regular season in team history, earning a team-record 108 points en route to a 50-24-8 record. And yet there was an uneven quality to the team’s performance. They started out white hot on home ice over the first 20 or so home dates then tailed off dramatically. Additionally, the Caps were fairly labeled a team which rose impressively to meet the challenges of the NHL’s elite but ‘played down’ to the levels of inferior competition. This season, the Capitals have been more consistently excellent against all comers.

Some nights they overpower their opponents with their firepower; other nights they triumph in a tactical attack in close-checking affairs; still other nights they win with great goaltending. The constant in the equation is Bruce Boudreau. He is unlikely to win again soon a Jack Adams trophy as the league’s best bench boss, given the volume of skill he coaches, but his team’s stylistic adaptability from night to night speaks volumes for his benchwork.

When 2008-09 ended abruptly, and torturously, in game 7 against Pittsburgh, conventional wisdom posited that the Capitals needed to explore summer free agency relatively aggressively to shore up weak areas exposed by the Penguins. Instead, management ventured modestly but in very well targeted fashion in the shopping season, securing the services of Mike Knuble and Brendan Morrison to replace Sergei Fedorov and Viktor Kozlov. Management left the team’s blueline intact, unaltered — and glutted with NHL-caliber talent.

Sometimes the best moves a GM makes are those he doesn’t.

By resisting the impulse to mortgage the Capitals’ future in a play for Chris Pronger last spring George McPhee today presides over a Cup-contending roster that appears of a contending-caliber far into the future.

Our warriors of winning this season are likely to lead the league in goals scored for the first time in franchise history. Their prolific offense is balanced superbly among three and at times even four lines, but Nicklas Backstrom deserves specific mention for the sniper’s shot he’s added to his world-class playmaking arsenal. The only downside to Backstrom’s season thus far is that he needs a new deal, and it’s going to cost the Caps a ton to get him inked.

Another lead storyline in 2009-10 has been the emergence of an Unheralded Trio: Tomas Fleischmann, Jeff Schultz, and Eric Fehr. If you want to pinpoint a reason why this year’s Capitals’ team looks formidable in the East as the season’s second half marches toward the postseason, the performances of these three players are a consistent catalyst.

When in last season’s preseason Bruce Boudreau spoke of Flash being a 30-goal scorer in the big league, few in media paid him much attention. Today, his are the hands of a 30-goal guy, and he’s now using them to great effect in the middle of the ice, helping forge a lethal follow-on line to Ovechkin-Backstrom-Knuble. Flash is nearly a point-per-game performer (17 goals, 19 assists in 41 games), and he will deservedly represent the Czech Republic in the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. His starring performance is all the more remarkable when you consider that he missed the entirety of training camp, and the season’s opening weeks, with a frightening blood clot.

Jeff Schultz’ preseason was unremarkable. Frankly, he struggled. Frankly, he emerged from the preseason a bit of an afterthought on the Capitals’ blueline, and an early healthy scratch from the lineup. Today, however, he’s rapidly matured into one of Bruce Boudreau’s most reliable rearguards. He will not dazzle you with breakout passes or points, nor manhandle opposing forwards down low. Instead, he smartly assesses an opponent’s attack, reliably takes effective defending angles, and covers vast stretches of his own zone with the breadth of his reach.

But no player overcame more from the end of 2008-09 than Eric Fehr. Early in the postseason he found himself under the knife for surgery on both shoulders. In the early portion of summer he was unable even to feed and dress himself. Early in 2010 he ranks among the most dangerous of third-line wings in the league, and he’s posted career-best numbers (28 points in 41 games) little more than halfway through the season. His production is particularly impressive in light of the modest minutes he nightly skates — rarely more than 11-12 minutes a night, with minimal time on the power play.

As if the Capitals weren’t stacked enough on the NHL roster, their American League affiliate in Hershey is actually outperforming them. Like the Caps, the Bears have flirted with a 20-point cushion over their second-place rival in the division. But the Bears never lose. Here’s their record in their last 21 games: 19-2. With 70 points earned through just 45 games, it’s quite conceivable that Hershey could easily better their best-ever point total of 114 from the 2006-07 season. For good measure the South Carolina Stingrays boast a 16-point lead in the South division of the ECHL. My friends in the Red Army, it is an embarrassment of puck riches we follow with this organization.

It is genuinely difficult to distinguish between the Capitals’ present and future when so much of the talent on the farm seems primed to contribute reliably and productively in the present. Witness the contributions this season of Karl Alzner, Michal Neuvirth, Mathieu Perreault, and John Carlson.

John Carlson, Conqueror of Canada! Gold medal for his bling! Red Army, acknowledge our Hero’s nation-slaying anew!

Carlson was among five players the Bears dispatched to the AHL All Star game earlier this month. A sixth, Braden Holtby, should have participated, but his season has been split between the East Coast and American leagues, and he represented the Stingrays as an All Star. With Hershey this season Holtby is on pace to obliterate team goaltending records. Of his team’s American League affiliation Capitals’ owner Ted Leonsis this month claimed, “The excellence with which that [Hershey] organization is run washes up on us.”

There can be no assurances that the gaudy success across the Washington hockey organization thus far this season will translate into long-lasting postseason success, but should Capitals’ General Manager George McPhee decide he needs to strengthen his roster heading into the postseason, he can. By jettisoning the pricey contracts of Michael Nylander and Chris Clark in the seaon’s first half, he’s created cap space for impact player additions, should he want them. The Capitals have cap space and assets aplenty to be prime players in the wheeling-dealing market of February and early March.

With so much good news enveloping hockey in Washington you’d think there’d be not a thing in the rink to complain about, but there is, and as ever, it’s who’s missing most nights in the rink: much of Washington’s elite media. The usual suspects are conspicuous in their absence. Additionally, a great loss in the middle of this season arrived with the demise of the Washington Times and rising star reporter Corey Masisak.

But there’s some good news on the media front: new and upstart sports talk radio 106.7 the Fan, which from program to program, day after day, recognizes our very winning hockey team wonderfully, and rebukes that other Caps-hating sports talk radio outlet in town (the one owned by you know who). The Fan, as an outlet of its ilk should, delights in the Caps’ MoJo and lavishes generous air team upon the only hot team in town.

Recently the Caps’ press box was filled for a visit from the Detroit Red Wings, for the 23rd home game on the season, and it marked the first visit by most local sports media outlets en masse since the home opener. There are miles to go still with local press to convince them that every home game with this hockey team is a special occasion.

You, however, our city’s fans who’ve sold out Verizon Center all season long, you, the frenzied Red Army, certainly don’t need to be told.

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.:

Last May, as Capitals’ players packed up their gear after succumbing to the Penguins in seven games and headed home for the offseason, an awful lot of Caps’ fans rightly wondered what management would do to upgrade a roster that, while 100-pt.-worthy and playoff-perennial, seemed an ingredient or two short of truly elite status. The answer, it turns out, was minimal and modest: wait more on the core.

It became apparent reasonably early in the offseason that the Capitals would not re-up with either Sergei Fedorov or Viktor Kozlov. They were replaced, brilliantly, by Brendan Morrison and Mike Knuble. Otherwise, the Caps’ roster remained more or less intact. Management liked its hand and reasoned that with another season of development and experience its largely organic core would mature more and produce better results. The Capitals last weekend secured 50 points faster than any other Caps’ club in team history, and for about the last month they’ve consistently flirted with no.1 in the league overall status. We don’t yet know if the Capitals are necessarily a club built better for the postseason ahead relative to last year, but clearly thus far management appears vindicated in handling the offseason as it did.

Three young players in particular I think have to be ID’d as maturing into larger and improved and thereby team-improving roles in 2009-10: Eric Fehr, Tomas Fleischman, and Jeff Schultz. All three are the beneficiaries of management’s patience.

Flash, drafted in 2002 by Detroit, was acquired from the Wings for Robert Lang in 2004 as part of the Capitals’ great pre-lockout purge of high-priced vets. Fleischmann quickly developed into a dominant scoring winger in the American League, flourishing most especially while skating for Bruce Boudreau in Hershey in the Bears’ Calder Cup title of 2005-06. The question then became, could Flash take his modest frame and still be productive in the bigger, faster National League.

It’s taken a while, but the answer today appears to be: absolutely. It’s clear that Bruce Boudreau believes it. During training camp in 2008 the head coach could be overheard in the locker room discussing 30-plus goal seasons ahead for the Czech winger. He believed in Flash then and he does now. Flash has a modest 47 goals in 216 NHL games, but 14 of those have come in his 25 games this season — a figure even more impressive when you consider that Flash had absolutely no training camp after being diagnosed with a blood clot in his leg over the summer. And his development into a productive, bona fide top-six forward hasn’t occurred at the expense of his defense: while he skated as a minus player his first four years in the league, this season he’s on the plus side of the ledger. He very well could score 30 goals for the Capitals this season, perhaps as a plus-10, and you have to think he’ll be given strong consideration for a spot on the Czech Republic Olympic entry in Vancouver.

Eric Fehr’s emergence this season is even more exciting in light of the litany of physical ailments he’s endured, his most recent in particular. He endured surgery on both shoulders this past offseason, unable even to feed himself during a portion of his recovery. But you’d never know it watching him play today.

Like Fleischmann, Fehr wasn’t physically ready for the start of this season, but he’s flourished in the moderate minutes Boudreau has accorded him. He put up 12 goals in 61 games with the Caps last season, and he will certainly better that tally this year. Drafted as the Capitals’ first-round selection in 2003, all the hockey world looked to be his oyster as his produced consecutive 50-plus goal seasons for Brandon in the WHL. He then enjoyed a strong rookie campaign in Hershey in 2005-06: 25 goals and 28 assists in 70 games. Then the injuries set in. A mysterious nerve malady that led to a herniated disc in his lower back. Then his shoulders failed him. Really he was never able to get settled into a development groove with the organization. It’s a testament to his perseverance and the Capitals’ patience that this season he is showcasing the hands and knack around the net that had Capitals’ scouts in western Canada so excited six years ago.

Like Fleischmann, Fehr’s worked hard to gain much-needed strength on his frame. Both wingers are considerably stronger on the puck than they were when first called up by the Caps.

Last but certainly not least in emergence this season is 2004 first round pick Jeff Schultz. He didn’t have a strong training camp by any measure, and in the early going he was a healthy scratch on the Capitals’ blueline. Moreover, were it not for Boudreau’s decision to retain eight defensemen coming out of camp, Sarge may have been marketed, but as injuries have ravaged that unit, Sarge has stepped up and logged important minutes, and Boudreau is confident enough in him of late to have him partnered with Mike Green. Sarge’s +15 is good for 5th best in the NHL.

Too many Caps’ fans I think focus on what Schultz is not: a banger, a deft skater, a points producer. But with experience he’s gained an increased awareness of his responsibilities in his own end, and he is particularly disciplined when it comes to taking penalties (12 PIMs in 29 games). Going forward, Schultz is likely to play an important role as a value-for-minutes guy: likely a no. 6 rearguard on a Cup-contending Caps’ club able to be slotted in to a 4 role if injuries set in. The Capitals are certain to have to pony up big dough in the years ahead for the likes of Mike Green, Karl Alzner, and John Carlson; Schultz will offer the team a value sedan among those spiffy sports cars.

The Capitals’ patience with their own assets not only looks wise in the standings today but particularly when juxtaposed against the relative impatience and annual free agency buffet feeding by the likes of Philadelphia, the Rangers, and Montreal. All three clubs were in the playoffs (briefly) last season. All three are on the outside looking in this morning. Championship clubs are seldom so assembled.