The Capitals’ communications team Saturday morning passed along some eye-opening data for Brooks Laich, who didn’t have a two-goal game in his first 214 NHL games but has three in his last nine outings. Laich has 10 goals and 12 points in the Capitals’ last 12 games, and now ranks third on the team with 19 goals. He entered this season with just 15 goals in 151 career NHL games.
The Capitals acquired Laich from the Ottawa Senators on February 18, 2004, in a somewhat controversial trade for a fella named Peter Bondra. Coverage of the deal was famous/infamous for camera shots of Bondra in tears out at Piney Orchard and Internet message boards littered with “Brooks who?” sentiments. Four years later, all of hockey is beginning to learn who Brooks Laich is.
At the time of the deal, Laich, then just 20, had played a grand total of one NHL game, and in the 2003-04 season, tallied a modest 16 goals for Binghamton and Portland in the American Hockey League. Bondra would go on to add 52 goals in a little more than two seasons in Ottawa, Atlanta, and Chicago before retiring. Laich, who won’t turn 25 until this summer, will score his 20th goal of the season any shift now, and by all appearances, he has a good many more ahead of him in his NHL career. He’s a magnificent skater, a grinder with soft gloves, a heart-and-soul type.
He’s particularly comfortable doing the dirty work in front of the opposition’s net.
“If you want money, you go to the bank. If you want bread, you go to the bakery. If you want goals, you go to the net,” Laich said.
Who in hockey back in February 2004 would have identified McPhee’s dealing of Bondra as lopsided . . . in favor of the Caps? That 2004 deal, incidentally, also brought from Ottawa a second-round pick, and in the summer of 2005 George McPhee flipped it to Colorado at the Entry Draft for a late first-round selection that day.
Joe Finley.
The NHL’s borderlessness is an unassailable virtue — the long-standing reality that a single NHL roster can be comprised of five or seven differing nationalities, all united in a common competitive cause. And yet as players move in significant volume as they did with last week’s trade deadline, big-time bureaucratic challenges set in as the complex immigration policies of sovereign nations mandate elaborate and well scrutinized process, formal inspection, and adjudication for players’ work eligibility. Media accounts briefly and generally allude to individual player’s visa challenges, but always without in-depth explanation. Fans are left to wonder: after a player in Canada is acquired via trade, just when will he arrive and dress and help out his new team? And why the delays?
Was in the then MCI Center the night of March 13, 2001 — also deadline day — when earlier in the day GMGM dealt Zednik and Bulis and a pick to Montreal for Zubrus and Linden, and the mood in last night’s rink felt larger and more significant . . . that dealmaking carried a component of risk; this was pure aggression with minimal assets heading out . . . the better comparison may be with March 1997, carried out not in a single day but over the course of a couple of weeks, when McPhee, in his first season on the job, added Brian Belllows and Esa Tikkanen . . . Enjoyed most of all throughout the late Tuesday afternoon and evening messages from friends and strangers who were busy with business throughout the day and wholly unaware of the deadline day madness that enveloped the Caps, who arrived at the news late and lavished it (in my email inbox) with happy obscenities and exclamation points . . . Mike Vogel, looking terrifically telegenic, rinkside on Comcast in the 5:00 hour to help analyze the breaking big news, me comparing his polished appearance before TV DC with his pre-sunrise, blogging-through-the-Moscow-night, comrade shagginess with me during last year’s Worlds . . . big bonus: dinner with Ron Weber in the press room on such a big day . . . look at all the media big wigs who show up when hockey creates the day’s sports buzz: George Solomon of the Post, three Times’ reporters, the one-time 
Huet was asked if he thought he’d be dealt today: “The only info I had last night was that I wasn’t playing with Montreal tonight. I was a little surprised.”
A Vancouver muckraker tried three times to get Cooke to bash coach Alain Vigneault and talk about why things didn’t work out in Vancouver, fishing for controversy. Cooke didn’t take the bait, with a tersely-worded “No Comment” followed by his intent to focus on his future here in Washington.
TSN is reporting on air that the Capitals have acquired C Sergei Fedorov. Early reports are for draft picks.
For a second-round pick.
The Comcast broadcast booth discussion last night of Mike Cammalleri’s game — Coach Boudreau informing JoeB and Craig that the gifted LA Kings’ pivot was, after Ovechkin, the most gifted hockey player he’d seen up close (Boudreau coached him in Manchester) — was interesting to me, to say the least.
Undeniably attractive, smart, and sexy. And Scarlett ain’t bad either. Some teams made just the right moves, not only in their choice of players but also with the deals they offered. Rather than spending like Donald Trump’s ex-wives, certain teams found the right player(s) for the right price.
Some teams went on benders to rival Ms. Lohan’s. The New York Rangers and the Philadelphia Flyers signed big name players to obscene contracts — making sexy but crazy moves. Like Tyrone Biggums with crack cocaine, neither team could resist the allure of spending with abandon. Clearly both teams’ rosters are dramatically improved for next season; but this sort of freewheeling spending backfires more often than not. They both are trying to buy championships; and in hockey, that rarely works.
So far, the other 2/3 of New York was brutally pillaged by free agency’s raiders. Like Nicole Richie, the Sabres and Islanders are skeletal remnants who practically qualify for Federal disaster assistance.
DraftGeeks, time for hosannas. TSN insider Bob McKenzie has released his top 60 
Highlights from this afternoon’s GMGM presser at Kettler-Capitals:
On the intrigue front: San Jose Sharks’ management, we 
From our vantage, the Washington Capitals have not yet assembled the key roster pieces that ownership and management need to supplement the rebuilding blocks laid during the first two post-lockout seasons — and which can deliver the Caps to springtime viability. Even prior to the trade of Dainius Zubrus, the team lacked a true first-line, playmaking pivot. This offseason, it needs to bring in skilled centers for the first two lines. One position presumably will be filled by 2006 draft gem Nicklas Backstrom of Sweden. Almost certainly the other will have to come from free agency or a trade this summer.
But this past weekend Ted also made an important point about the imperative of fans trusting in a team’s organic growth. Alexander Semin and his spectacular season,