Camp convened with perhaps only one roster spot genuinely open and available among the top nine forward spots (second line center) (or is it first?). It was pursued by a small assembly of center ice men who came to be known as ‘The Bubble Boys.’  But even with this storyline the drama didn’t build greatly, as Mathieu Perreault emerged early and decisively as the top performer. He led the Caps in scoring during the preseason. And after Sunday night’s camp-concluding exhibition game against Chicago, Bruce Boudreau said of no. 85, “I think our best player all of camp was Perreault. I think he played with energy every night.” On the radio last night, Mike Vogel was similarly impressed: “He’s been consistently good throughout the preseason regardless of which line he’s been on.”

The forward ranks offered this camp its exclusive intrigue, and that was muted drama. On the blueline, the top six were set before camp started, and likewise, the Capitals’ net was set before training camp’s first conditioning whistle blew.

This drama-free state of affairs was by design. In the middle of the offseason the GM overhauled his roster heavily for size and grit and experience up front on the wings, some character and a former captain’s experience and leadership to center the fourth line, and then the ultimate offseason coup — Tomas Vokoun. Offseason changer, that.  Training camp quickly became more a dress rehearsal than an audition.

Camp’s top storylines:

• As important as McPhee’s offseason roster moves were, it was what the GM did at his office keyboard while the wounds of another short postseason were still raw that likely set in motion the business-like tenor of this training camp. At camp’s dawning the Washington Post reported that early in the offseason that Capitals’ players were issued a written warning about changed expectations for fitness for duty come September:

” . . . players received letters early this summer warning them to expect an Albert Haynesworth-like timed fitness test with controlled recovery intervals at the start of camp.’

That was George McPhee the enforcer enforcing a culture change for his hockey club. Overdue, in my opinion. May it be the last time Albert Haynesworth’s name is evoked in connection with the Capitals.

• More on the conditioning/work ethic/maturation front: Ben Raby, writing for the Toronto Star, got captain Ovechkin to concede that his 2010-11 showing wasn’t up to par on a number of fronts. He approached last season looking past its regular season toward the postseason, and sacrificed his conditioning in the process. His owner took note:

“He tried something different,” Caps owner Ted Leonsis said. “He wanted to work his way into shape so that he would peak during the playoffs.”

Indeed, Ovechkin admitted that all year he “just wanted to be ready for the playoffs.

“I was starting, like, in the middle (of the season) to be in shape.”

• Vitally important testimony attesting to the Capitals fall-time fitness arrived at the dawn of training camp, from team strength and conditioning coach Mark Nemish.  “I already know [Ovi's] in shape; I can tell. “We’ve worked several times on the ice and, without a doubt, he’s in the best shape I’ve ever seen him.”

• The kiss or death . . . or well considered wooing?: The Hockey News tabbed the Caps as 2012 Stanley Cup champions.

• The GM sure likes his hockey club. At CapsCon, he told the assembled thousands that this year’s squad reminded him very much of the ’97-’98 club — the one that advanced to the Stanley Cup finals. “It’s going to be a hard team to play against. Maybe not as offensive, but more physical.” Superb coverage of CapsCon from the Examiner’s Michael Hoffman here.

• If the Caps hoped that Vokoun would inspire Michal Neuvirth it appears early on to have worked. Neuvy was especially strong this preseason. There may not be the 60-20 split in games between the two that a lot of folks thought about three weeks ago.

• McPhee also chimed in on realignment, all but stating that 2011-12 would be, mercifully, the final season for the Southeast division. What it’s looking like now: two 15-team conferences with 8- and 7-team divisions within. Apparently a popular plan would see the Capitals reunited with the New York clubs and the Flyers in a division. I say, why go halfway — get the best rivalry in all of hockey, and one of the best in all of sports, rekindled as well. Anyway, when it’s official, OFB I think will host a realignment party in town, where we’ll give away NASCAR posters and coupons for Waffle House. And certainly we’ll have a Gary Bettman pinata.

• Netgate.

• Camp standout: Dmitri Orlov. Still with the team partially because of John Erskine’s rehab, but also because he’s played with poise and impact that belie his years this preseason. Stock seriously on the rise.

• Camp standout, on the air: John Walton. If you haven’t given much thought to following Caps hockey on the radio in recent years, you should now.

• One of the biggest stirs in camp perhaps came with the team in Chicago for a game, and when red, white, and blue old timers returned to Kettler for the organization’s first-ever alumni game. Old timers Alan May and Kevin Kaminski drew blood from dropped gloves. I got a good chuckle from learning that Killer had earned the first-ever Alumni Game’s first-ever first star of the game designation.

• Don’t overlook this sidebar to the new season: the trading of Semyon Varlamov delivered to the Caps Colorado’s first-rounder next June. McPhee really likes the ’12 draft — it’s much stronger than this past June’s, he intimated at CapsCon. You might want to take a look at where Adam Proteau has the ‘Lanche finishing out West this season.

What might this season’s lines look like?

Ovi – Backstrom – Brouwer

Semin – MJ90/Perreault – Knuble

Chimera – Laich – Ward

Hendricks – Halpern – Beagle

Love those third and fourth lines.

One of which isn’t Atlanta.

The story of the Atlanta Thrashers really is pretty much the same with that of the Atlanta Flames: a long-odds experiment carried off for about a decade before largely vast vistas of rink emptiness. “Many nights the Thrashers played in front of great wastelands of empty chairs at futuristic Philips Arena, located downtown beside CNN headquarters and the Centennial Olympic Plaza,” the Canadian Press noted yesterday.

Although with the Thrash you ought to acknowledge that in the persons of Ilya Kovalchuk and Dany Heatley and Marian Hossa there were top-flight superstars wearing the team sweater, in their prime . . . and still it didn’t matter. There are of course superb hockey fans in Atlanta. There just aren’t enough of them.

Big league hockey has now failed twice in Atlanta. It should be a cold day in August there before it’s located there again. The Atlanta Spirit are the boogeymen of the moment in that town, but in time the Atlanta Journal Constitution will reflect on the failure with greater sobriety and perspective. Or maybe not. More importantly, we need our commissioner to reflect thusly.

Ultimately, he’s the figure to blame for hockey going up in flames in Atlanta. Hockey never belonged in Atlanta. You can’t quite imagine eight or ten buses filled with Atlanta hockey fans driving up 95 to take in a Saturday night Islanders game next season, can you?

Did you behold Bettman’s constipation-like countenance yesterday in Manitoba, at the presser confirming the worst-kept secret in the history of the NHL? If it wasn’t a look of constipation, it surely was one of ‘My eldest daughter just texted me from a tattoo parlor in Vegas, where she’s apparently eloping with a roadie for a gangster rap band.’

In his nearly 20-year tenure as NHL commissioner, yesterday in Manitoba won’t rank among the highlight moments for Gary Bettman.

Nor should it.

Hours before the start of the Stanley Cup finals the commissioner was out in the Canadian prairie, explaining (sort of) how it was that a top 10 U.S. market had rejected his marketing experiment. Yesterday in Manitoba was a seminal moment for the NHL, and it ought to have been one for the league’s owners and their unflinching conviction in the branding wisdom of their commish. It was Gary Bettman, the NBA marketing genius, who sold them on this notion that hockey can pretty much be plopped down anywhere in the U.S. and succeed just fine. Today we know with certainty that it cannot.

I’m very happy this summer for the hockey-loving people of Winnipeg, but some core questions emerge from news like yesterday’s, and they ought to be grappled with by the owners promptly. Foremost among them:

• Is NHL hockey a 30-market enterprise? And if it is, should a glut of franchises be located well south of the Mason Dixon Line?

• Also: Irrespective of lease agreements, how much arena emptiness, over successive years, is too much emptiness?

• Lastly (for the moment): If there is to be additional, dramatic market correction, and associated realignment, is Gary Bettman the guy we want carrying it off?

There was, too, a conspicuously ominous backdrop to yesterday’s news, and it too offers another referendum front for this commissioner. For most sensible people, there is an inevitability of failure to be found as well in the Arizona desert for NHL hockey. The Coyotes put a few more fannies in their seats than the Thrashers did (I think), but their rink is stupidly situated, virtually impossible to access by car from Phoenix in rush hour. Kinda like old Capital Centre was. And like Atlanta, there is no root infrastructure buttressing the big league club, no flowering youth and high school hockey scene driving hockey parents and hockey playing kids to the games. There is with the Phoenix Coyotes the fairly broadly held belief that this spring they stayed their ultimate execution by merely a year, that where we were with the Thrashers the past few weeks is where we’ll be with Phoenix in a year’s time, maybe sooner. Just as no notable deep pockets showed up to bail out the Thrash in their town, none ever seem to out in the desert for that hockey club. For good reason.

Strike two for this commish. Anyone wanna bet the bleeding stops with Phoenix?

In recent years I’ve come to the conviction that hockey can not only survive but thrive in non-traditional markets, but that a root infrastructure of support must take hold in these uncommon outposts. Hockey is an expensive sport to play, an expensive sport to patronize 40-plus times a season. It helps a lot to have it located in a community of affluence. Washington passes this test with flying colors. We actually have kids here on travel teams who go up against top competition in New England, the upper Midwest, and Canada and win games. As a community, we invest well in the development of our hockey players, relatively new to the sport though we are, and that investment is paying dividends. DeMatha’s hockey team competed in a top-flight tournament in Maine last season, around the holidays, and the Maryland high school surprised a lot of New Englanders with their competitiveness. DeMatha’s first two lines can often compete with those of many of New England’s power schools. They lose games up there with their third and fourth lines. It’s an issue of depth. I bet that gap closes in the next five or six years.

We aren’t a hockey town merely because we say we are, and we will be one after Alexander Ovechkin retires. And Gary Bettman had nothing to do with our becoming one.

An agreement to sell the National Hockey League’s Atlanta Thrashers to a Winnipeg group which plans to relocate the franchise to the Manitoba capital is done.

Sources confirmed tonight that preparations are being made for an announcement Tuesday, confirming the sale and transfer of the Thrashers to True North Sports and Entertainment, which owns and operates the Manitoba Moose of the American Hockey League and the MTS Centre arena, which would become the NHL team’s new home.

“The Atlanta Thrashers were a professional ice hockey team based in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. They were members of the Southeast Division of the Eastern Conference of the National Hockey League (NHL).”

The entry was subsequently modified. Though perhaps to be modified again — perhaps even today. Because of:

This tweet from Fan590 personality Greg Brady:

Brady added in a subsequent tweet: “Let’s face it. Gary might have needed to keep Coyotes in PHX to free up Winnipeg for Thrashers. Quebec’s not ready in 11-12.”

The sixty four competitors are divided up into four brackets, just like the NCAA hoops tourney (until recently), and they’re named after . . . golfing legends: Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Gary Player, Bobby Jones.

Once upon a time, the NHL identified its divisional alignment by the names of legends in the sport — Smythe, Norris, Patrick, Adams. Who changed that? Why, the visionary marketing guru hired away from the NBA, Gary Bettman.

How’s that structural re-branding worked out, do you imagine, over the past decade and a half, in terms of broadening NHL hockey’s elemental identity? Also, looking back on the rationale offered at the time by the league for jettisoning hockey’s heritage, how does it strike you today? Would it be wise, do you think, to replicate it, given the league’s overall standing in the sports world today? (The league’s American television contract is with Versus, incidentally.)

(Here’s another fun question for you: what will be the name of the division in which the Capitals reside in about 12 weeks’ time, after the moving vans have packed up the Thrash?)

This PGA Tour event, by virtue of its structural novelty and elite talent, draws more media attention than does your typical Tour event. PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem of course presides over a niche sport; interest in professional golf in America will never rival that of fans’ interest for football, basketball, or baseball — and the moreso once Tiger’s competitive viability durably wanes. And yet Finchem, in his remarkable curator’s role in growing the Tour’s revenues (admittedly aided to no small degree by Woods’ emergence) has never sold out his sport’s heritage. Pro golf under Finchem has enjoyed a stratospheric rise in fiscal health, while not ever losing a sense of its historical bearings. It’s a good thing, I think, for a professional sport of significant legacy to adhere where it can to its roots. Its hero roots.

Finchem, incidentally, arrived at his present post in 1994 — one year after Bettman.

• 23 busloads of hockey fans from Quebec City, all attired in Nordiques’ bleu.

I used to think a half dozen buses of Flyers’ fans pulling up in front of old Capital Centre, and soon thereafter making the brawling on the ice appear child’s play relative to the fisticuffs those hooligans initiated in the stands, a sizable show of high-pitched passion, to say nothing of malicious mischief. I can’t imagine what 23 busloads of impassioned Quebecois will look and sound like in an otherwise empty Isles’ rink tonight. What a brilliant bit of passion-branding by Nordiques Nation.

Think about it: beyond the extraordinary volume of Quebecois crammed into 23 buses (and with all the attention this story is getting, maybe it’ll be more (seats for the game are still available — hah!)), it’s a 10-hour busride from Quebec City to Long Island. This Revolution en Bleu is basically surrendering an entire holiday weekend for two-and-a-half hours of lousy hockey, just to make their passion and commitment more broadly known . And even with a somewhat downscaled New York media monitoring the moment, they surely will.

What an embarrassing moment tonight will be for this apparently tenured-for-life NHL commissioner. I’m all for embarrassing him. And it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see the lower bowl in Glendale Bleu-ed-out by the Quebecois during a playoff game next spring. Canadians love migrating to the warm sun after a hard winter, and the moreso if unloved hockey in t-shirts and shorts is available.

Fanhouse has more on this massive breach of our borders by Nordiques’ bleu:

“The plan is that the large group of fans will sit in the lower bowl behind each net with light blue shirts that read ‘Nordiques Nation.” At the 15:00 mark of each period, the group plans to make a lot of noise to commemorate the 15 years it has been since the Nordiques left Quebec City for Denver. With rumors of relocation swirling for both the Thrashers and Islanders, the Nordiques supporters plan to make their voices heard in an attempt to help bring NHL hockey back to their hometown.

“We just want to show the N.H.L. that Quebec needs a team and is a better market,” [Quebec radio personality and event organizer Vince] Cauchon told the New York Times. “Maybe a third of the markets in the N.H.L. aren’t doing so well right now.”

Heinz Field of course is home to the Steelers, and that begins and ends the NHL’s association with football next New Years Day. The goalposts should have been ditched, goal nets placed in the end zones instead, and the substance of the presser should have focused on past, present and future animosity as it relates to one of hockey’s great rivalries.

In an era of UFC, some Hatfield and McCoys in skates would have worked magnificently out on Heinz Field last week, but it wasn’t to be, because there’s a huge hit or huge miss tact the league takes to marketing our game. On the one hand we receive gems such as the pitch-perfect, highly amusing and entertaining 30-second spots that run throughout the season on the NHL Network. Some celebrate hockey’s inter-generational appeal, others the physical and emotional sacrifices associated with the pursuit of the Stanley Cup. Still others are just laugh out loud funny. The success of those spots is attributable to their celebration of hockey’s intrinsic spirit. Last week at Heinz Field the league took the opposite approach. All of the longstanding spirit of the Caps-Pens was AWOL. It was a great opportunity missed.

Touting the Caps-Pens rivalry isn’t to diminish the other great rivalries in the NHL, but next New Years Day represents the first instance of the league marrying its great new success, the Winter Classic, with one of its great storylines of every season. The Associated Press believes this is the greatest rivalry in all of hockey:

“The rivalry already is so good — the teams’ seven-game Eastern Conference playoff series two seasons ago was one of the NHL’s most compelling in years — Crosby doesn’t believe it will intensify by moving outdoors.

“I don’t think you can imagine it being more intense than it already is,” Crosby said.

The megawatt presence of Alexander Ovechkin and Sidney Crosby to these franchises has only catapulted the rivalry into must-see moments for sports fans generally. It’s a wonder this game didn’t inaugurate the Winter Classic.

But last Tuesday we had images of Sidney Crosby and Mike Knuble holding footballs and yucking it up. Why?

Here’s what ought to have transpired out on Heinz Field instead last week: key figures from the current teams should have been joined by alumni from Caps-Pens battles of yesteryear, and players present and past should have taken turns relating anecdotes of their great and fierce battles as they related to this rivalry.

photo by the Associated Press

On Sidney Crosby’s first-ever visit to Washington years ago I had a chance to interview him in the visitor’s locker room after a game, and the very first thing I asked him was to what extent was he aware of the Caps-Pens years-long poisonous relations. I was pleasantly shocked at his reply. He told me that he spent a fair portion of the previous summer pouring over vintage Caps-Pens games, precisely because so many in the Penguins’ organization had prioritized the rivalry for him. He spoke eloquently of the rivalry’s meaning even as a newcomer to it. I almost liked him for that.

Ironically, away from Heinz Field, Pittsburgh’s Max Talbot got to the heart of the matter by going on local radio and launching the latest missile in this ice war. He reiterated his hatred of the Washington hockey team and its star. Talbot’s radio rant was this Winter Classic’s most salient and sellable moment to date. It was a  moment that no doubt made Gary Bettman and his marketing team cringe, while all hockey fans savored it. That moment should have teed off an in-kind roundtable of reflection down on Heinz Field about what will make next January 1 so special in the young legacy of the Winter Classic. Instead we saw mostly a bunch of Canucks tossing around a football and firing pucks between the wrong set of goalposts, looking silly.

Let it be a teaching moment for the league’s marketers: for the league’s showcase event of its regular season, trust in the intrinsic value of our great game, as you sometimes do, and most especially capitalize on one of its most compelling features: warriors, generation after generation, bearing a common crest, going to war against a hated neighbor. The names and numbers of the warriors in this special engagement change, however the hatred never abates. There’s a fierceness and intensity to the matchups between these storied rivals that I think is unrivaled anywhere else in the league, and next New Years Day, the battle takes place in a Roman Coliseum-sized setting.

“If George McPhee’s rep for mining gems from the deep substrata of the first isn’t already set, it could be soon. The Caps’ GM, who already hit it big with Mike Green (29th overall, 2004) and John Carlson (27th, 2008), looks like he could have added another jewel to his system with Evgeny Kuznetsov at 26. The 18-year-old winger isn’t big (6-0, 172), but he possesses an offensive explosiveness similar to current Cap Alexander Semin. If not for the Russian passport, his skill level likely would have led someone to call his name sooner. “That could be a real value pick,” a Western Conference scout told SI.com. “They’ve got the people in place there [Alex Ovechkin, Semin and others] that should help with [his] transition and a system that he should be comfortable with. [McPhee's scouting staff] have done a good job loading up that system.” The Caps also may have found value in third-rounder Stanislav Galiev (86th), a skilled right winger from the Saint John Sea Dogs who some experts predicted could go in the first round, and Phil Grubauer (112th), the German-born goaltender who led the Windsor Spitfires to the Memorial Cup last month. A scout noted that neither player projects as a sure thing, but both have elements that make you think “there might be something special there.” “These are both talented kids,” he said. “There’s no rush on either of them. They’ve got time and that may be all they need.”

Muir left Jeff Schultz off his list.

* * * * *

At last summer’s Capitals Convention I had a chance to ask Ted Leonsis about a goodwill tour to Russia his team might undertake to showcase its holdings of high-end Russian talent. This is an idea that’s been brokered by the NHL with Russia’s hockey leaders but hung up, to some degree, over the absence of a player transfer agreement between the governing bodies. The owner demurred at my reference to it, assigning such a tour the designation ”distraction” for another day, something to think about after the team had won a Stanley Cup. Maybe, but what if that day doesn’t arrive? It’d still be very wise for the Caps to embark on such a goodwill tour of exhibition games against KHL clubs, for instance; you need spend only 5 minutes in Dmitry Chenokov’s company talking about the Capitals’ popularity in Russia to understand what such a trup would mean to global hockey. I have to think this is a trip the team would very much like to make, in the not-too-distanct future. Obviously, it’s something the captain would savor. And you’d think the Caps would want to pursue it while Ovi is in his playing prime.

I thought about this trip again this past weekend as the Caps selected two more highly skilled Russians in Los Angeles, adding to their aura of being Moscow West. As I noted Saturday, in two years time the Capitals’ second line could feature Alexander Semin, Evgeny Kuznetsov, and Dmitry Kugryshev. Semyon Varlamov may well be cemented as the team’s no. 1 in net, and Dmitri Orlov could be patrolling the team’s blueline then. And of course they’d be captained by the world’s greatest player, a native of Moscow. As an offseason event such a trip would be a media gold mine for the club.

* * * * *

Over the weekend various bloggers for Southeast teams received an invite from well-respected blogger and Cycle Like the Sedins founder James O’Brien to contribute reactions to a fresh reconsideration of the Southeast division, what with all the recent front office changes (Florida, Tampa, Atlanta) and a glut of high-end picks heading to Southeast teams this past weekend. The Panthers had, what, five of the first 36 selections in the 2010?

I didn’t respond to O’Brien’s invitation, for from my vantage, no chair moving or sweater changing can fundamentally alter my outlook on the Bettman abomination that is the SouthLeast. Like Rosemary’s Baby, it was ill-conceived.

The division claimed two Stanley Cup victories within its first 10 years of existence. No matter. Its DNA is in NASCAR and the SEC. Fans can’t travel to away games, except on trust funds. Consequently, there are no significant rivalries that have been birthed. There aren’t even insignificant rivalries. There are no rivalries. And look at the way four of the division’s five teams have drafted for most of the past 10 years. Even when bluechippers are secured, they (Boumeester, Luongo, Jack Johnson, Nathan Horton) can’t get out of Dodge fast enough. Other than Washington, what Southeast destination today would you decsribe as one that free agents can’t wait to sign with?

It needs to be blown up.

Hockey hottie, to be pressed into humanitarian service at the draft

In the opening moments of Versus’ coverage of the NHL Entry Draft Friday night male viewers were treated to an appearance by, and interview of, lovely Alyssa Milano, celebrity puckhead of the first order. The interview was fun and illuminating — the Milano family, we learned, loves its hockey. We didn’t see her again, and the rest of the night, Gary Bettman dominated the broadcast, shaking approximately four hundred sets of hands, many of them in repeat fashion. It was excruciatingly dull. Talk about a television event peaking early. That’s but one symptom of what’s wrong with this yawn-inducing event.

It needs more Alyssa, a lot less Bettman.

Think about it: the league is asking a national television audience to tune in to an event in prime time on a summer Friday night that will have action — such as draft activity can be said to be such — once every 10 minutes or so. Some post mortems from Friday’s event suggested that the telecast was hampered by a paucity of name player trades on the draft floor. Nah. Even a half dozen doozies of those wouldn’t have altered the draft as a Bettman-centric event.

George McPhee was everybody’s favorite manager on the evening for expeditiously galloping up to the stage and announcing the Caps’ first-round selection. It was a drive-by selection, mercifully, a manager’s commendable humanitarian act. The rest of the managers, and their scouts, and their VPs for hockey operations, and their rescue mutts, took turns saying thank you to the host town and team, hello to fans watching at team draft parties, adieu to retiring execs, and even imparted a few backyard barbeque recipes before announcing their selections. These were State of the Team Union addresses gone very long and very dry and very unnecessary.

To go back to Bettman the Dullard, why must he proceed over the entirety of the first round’s four hours? Because that’s what the other commissioners do? That’s no justification. The NHL’s draft will always lag behind those of other pro sports in general interest level because save baseball’s the draftees in those other sports fairly make immediate contributions to their drafting clubs, particularly in the NBA and NFL. One or two or three guys at the very top of the NHL draft have a plausible chance at making the opening night roster come autumn, that’s it. Consequently, the NHL draft is a party for draftgeeks. But not media. And certainly not a general television audience. And what the league is doing with its draft in terms of production values ensures its being a snorefest.

To make it a party, the commissioner ought to open the evening with a terse hello and then hand off the proceedings to a hockey-loving mega celebrity. Like Alyssa Milano. Carrie Underwood’s attended a few hockey games in recent seasons; she I think could be deemed an enthusiast of our sport.  She’d enliven the draft stage a wee bit.

Think that parade of 18-year-olds selectees might have enjoyed being on the receiving end of a stage hug and a peck from Alyssa or Carrie? You’d have sixth-round prospects flying in from Siberia just to be in the building. The draft would sell out (as a free event).

I can think of an outfit for entry draft hosting for Shania Twain that would draw a few more eyes to the TV.

Friday night Bettman would shake GMs’ hands and then shake them again an hour later when the same GMs returned to the stage. Steve Martin or Billy Crystal hosting the Oscars this was not.

Shania, dressed for draft success

Other (hottie) celebs ought to be brought in and accorded TV time. Hockey players disproportionately seem to attach themselves to fashion models and actresses and other attractive entertainers. It might have been fun, for instance, to have had Underwood interviewed in the middle of the first round and elicit from her an appraisal of how much she’s learned about hockey in recent seasons from attending Ottawa Senators’ games. The NHL isn’t bashful about including hockey-loving celebs at its Winter Classic; why not the draft as well?

I’ve traveled to attend a draft, and even in a year (2002) when the Capitals had a glut of high selections I found the event to be an energy sapping snorefest. There’s a whole lot of waiting around for something to happen (it’s like soccer in that regard), and if you’re seated in the upper deck by about minute seven between picks you want to hang yourself over the ledge. Go to one draft, you don’t ever need to attend another. But even watching it on TV has grown incredibly stale. Even bellicose histrionics from Pierre McGuire can’t save this event from itself.

There is great action at the draft, but fans — in the arena and watching at home — are necessarily walled off from it. I’m referring to the strategy table deliberations among a GM and his scouts. That’s the nitty-gritty grist of the draft, and that’s proprietary stuff, obviously, but I wonder if fans couldn’t be brought on the inside there to some small degree? A team’s GM and all its scouts have terrifically important work to conduct on the draft floor, but I wonder if a PR staffer for each team could be empowered to Tweet, in real time, something more than gossip but info less than that that would compromise a team’s standing?

We learned well after the draft telecast had concluded that the Caps were trying to trade up (fairly dramatically) to land the guy they most wanted in round one. What if Ross Mahoney had shared that info for Nate Ewell to relay on line just seconds after his GM walked off the draft stage? Nothing proprietary is being compromised in such a scenario.

This is a proposal positing an intrusion upon an inviolate feature of hockey culture; I’d have an easier time leaving the rink with Alyssa for a late-night tour of L.A. in her limo.