On Frozen Blog

Monday night was anything but another ordinary weeknight regular season game at Verizon Center. A healthy sampling of the communications crew from the Hershey Bears made the trip down, their schedule at last allowing for a visit to D.C. to catch up with the newly promoted coach they so admire. The voice the Bears, John Walton, brought along Chris Poisal, who’s keeping Bears’ stats for Coach Bob Woods, and Lamont Buford, who keeps the Bears’ web site fresh and informative. Chris, incidentally, started blogging this fall ["Dupree in the Sin Bin"] and is tracking American Hockey League life with commendable breadth and detail. He’s become my pipeline to real-time progress reports on Eric Fehr’s rehab.

Coach Boudreau didn’t know about the visit from his friends ahead of time, and so the scene inside the Caps’ room after last night’s victory was warm like you might imagine — made the moreso by Quintin Laing’s game-winning heroics.

I hadn’t seen these guys since Hershey’s home opener back in late October, and given the intervening developments of note since then, last night’s reunion made for a lively dinner chat. It was fascinating listening to the perspectives on the big changes from these guys who know Coach Boudreau best. You might recall that the Bears were in Philadelphia on Friday, November 23, playing that night against the Phantoms after Bruce Boudreau made his debut as Caps’ coach that afternoon against the Flyers. These circumstances helped fuel an emotion in the Hershey organization that day that was, Walton told me, at times overwhelming.

“After the [2006 Calder] Cup, that day was the most rewarding in my entire hockey career,” he told me. “I was so spent that by the time we boarded the bus to get back [to Hershey], I was asleep before it pulled out.”

There seems to be a lot of Hershey Bears influence about the Caps these days, all of it positive. I find myself wishing it’d arrived here about 10 years ago.

Now then. There were of course notable items from last night’s game, led first and foremost by the fact that someone in Caps’ communications managed to see me seated next to a recent Miss New Jersey, who was, yes, blogging from the game. I didn’t believe at first, either (although she was distinctly attractive), but Vogel assured me it was true. Plus, early Tuesday morning, over breakfast in a Mayflower suite, she showed me her crown. Kidding about the Mayflower — what blogger could afford that lodging?

• What was with all that room on the ice for the Caps’ skilled forwards to skate the puck? New Jersey was missing one half of its shutdown tandem of John Madden and Jay Pandolfo, and that seemed to make a huge difference. But it also appears to be true that Brent Sutter wants his team to skate with its opposition — to trade chances. If true, what a welcome change from ten-plus years of trap hockey. New Jersey visits to D.C. ranked as my least favorite among opponents, for their I-wish-I-had-a-Michener-novel-during-play-quality, but last night’s game was well played and fun to watch.
• Remember the gratuitously poor line changes that occasionally victimized the Glen Hanlon-led Caps, and less commonly, the too many men on the ice penalties? Where are they now? I keep hearing the word “system” referenced by media at games, inferring that some reasonably radical formations are being deployed by Bruce Boudreau; the more relevant difference with the Caps of the past two weeks is the heightened discipline with which it’s skating.
• Everyone in the press mentioned the dominance of last night’s second period. The Devils had a strong start to open the game, and a real strong opening five minutes in the third. But the rest of the game belonged to the Caps. This was an injury-depleted Caps’ club — and key injuries at that. And yet it throttled a white-hot Devils’ club. We were told throughout October and most of November that a fair evaluation of Glen Hanlon couldn’t take place because of injuries. Really?
• New Jersey’s David Clarkson made a point of targeting Alexander Ovechkin with some pointed physicality early on, and AO never seemed to forget it for the remainder of the game. Even deep in the third AO was aware of Clarkson on the ice — and sending a weight-tossing Christmas card his way.
• It didn’t seem much colder in Verizon Center, but pucks seemed to stay flatter on the surface, and I noticed especially the amount of snow on the ice at the conclusion of period one.
• Olie Kolzig appeared to be fighting the puck a bit last night.
• Shaone Morrisonn and Mike Green are fast taking on a shutdown aura to their pairing.
• Speaking of Green, if you’re wondering why Boudreau is making liberal use of him on the Caps’ power play, watch his footwork and agility in his lateral cycling of the puck on the point. Bryan Muir there he ain’t.
• There are nights when Alexander Ovechkin sees the ice magically, regularly directing passes crisply and creatively to wide-open teammates in ways only the world’s elite can. His high-low, cross-ice laser to a startled Viktor Kozlov in the second period was just such an instance, and there were a half dozen similar setups from him Monday night.
• The injury-ravaged Caps caught a break in not seeing Marty Brodeur in net last night. Kevin Weekes didn’t play poorly at all, but he played the puck brutally.
• More and more mobility is arriving for Alexander Semin. The Caps are an entirely different hockey club with a healthy Semin skating in the lineup. I’ve made a point before of claiming him to be the most skilled hockey player ever to wear a Caps’ sweater. Last night Eric McErlain told me, “The puck is on a Yo-Yo string with [Semin], and he’s the only one on the ice who knows what’s going to happen with it.”