Still: no summer has proven to be as ill-equipped to heal a previous hockey season’s hurt as this past one was for me. Time is supposed to heal all hurt, but as recently as August I listened closely to reflections from departed heart-and-soul Capitals’ veterans, hardly axe-grinders, and longstanding concerns I had were renewed from their views. Still, this morning, there is something healing in the air.

Hockey returns in full force this weekend, with the start of training camp, and it brings a host of hotly talked about questions related to the state of the Capitals. For the Hockey News, at least, all is well. We though who’ve lived long in Washington know better.

The Washington Capitals drafted Alexander Ovechkin no. 1 overall in 2004. That summer, I never imagined that seven years later we’d be where we are today: still disappointed.

Not just unsuccessful, but profoundly disappointed.

No one member of a hockey team, not even one of the sport’s richest captains, is singularly responsible for the premature demise of his club, but Ovi himself knows — and embraces — the unprecedented role he plays as Ambassador of Hockey in the nation’s capital. The draft lottery luck that delivered this franchise-altering talent was meant to alter miserable springs in these parts, and to date that hasn’t happened. We’re still wrestling with why, and suddenly an athlete’s calendar seems of essence.

Ovi celebrates his 26th birthday this weekend. To most observers, he’s lodged in the prime of his professional hockey career. Only twice in his six NHL seasons has he failed to record 100 points, but 2010-11, he bottomed out: 32 goals and just 85 points. By his own admission he wasn’t in shape, and for most of last season he looked slow. In 2007-08, Ovechkin scored 65 goals. We do have to ponder the possibility that we’ve seen already his very best hockey, that it’s behind him. If that’s true, what are the implications for the Caps?

Capitals’ players report for the start of training camp this weekend, and there are for me five overriding questions confronting this hockey club as it enters what may be the most important season in franchise history. I say that because one more season of conspicuous failure is virtually certain to inaugurate sweeping changes to the Capitals’ core (and perhaps beyond), the very core most of us believed would lead the team toward Stanley Cup contention.

Season-defining questions, in order of importance:

• Will we see the return of Ovi 1.0? I think we know the brand of hockey Ovi likes best to play, and here I’m not talking about systems and such. If this team fails again I’d at least like to see Capitals’ opponents pay a heavy price in victory. The Capitals of especially the past couple of seasons haven’t been all that tough to play against. They were, comparatively speaking, when Ovi was a one-man wrecking ball, dishing out thunderous, glass-shaking (and clean) hits. And opponents — even big-bodied blueliners — gave him deference. By about year five of his career it became vogue in media circles to opine that Ovechkin’s brute physical style wasn’t suited to last in this league. Well, I’ve seen the alternative — Ovi in a trap, Ovi in a hybrid trap, Ovi floating, Ovi manning the power play point, and I’m underwhelmed. Ovi is at his best (and most exciting) when he skates as the proverbial bull in a china shop. Bruce Boudreau suggested this summer that he will again tweak his system to allow for a greater attack ethos. So: free Ovi in the process, I say, and make our opponents pay. And roster additions on the order of Troy Brouwer and Joel Ward bolster the hopes for a more physical brand of hockey in red this season.

• Is Ovi truly ready and fit to lead? There is the risk of making too much of the parting comments from Matt Bradley, ones echoed in their entirety days later by Dave Steckel, but there is also the risk of ignoring them altogether. Brads intimated that Ovi’s leadership — on and off the ice — required maturation. We ought to see if there’s been any if he reports fit for duty this weekend.

• Will there be a culture of accountability? Elusive in recent seasons: Sixty minutes of committed, character play. The bench got shortened, Brads suggested, even when front-line performers weren’t performing. Perhaps worse: there was a tiered system of accountability with practices, too — big-money guys were gone from grunt-work under suspicious circumstances. The head coach has to address this, beginning this weekend. Call it a lunch-pail ethos, call it crafting a blue-collar identity — I call it skating nightly with pride for the crest you wear — but the Capitals this season need to intimidate with work ethic and passion. They need to give Washington hockey fans 60 minutes of effort. I’m of the school that suggests that such commitment bears directly on what hockey in spring looks like. Accountability, too, confronts the coach. Perhaps Bruce Boudreau, unlike a few of his younger new coaching peers, has had to learn on the job in the NHL. His evolution into a quality bench maestro must arrive now. There simply can be no more game-costing screwups with line changes, no more deer-in-headlight looks as momentum sways the other way in the postseason.

• Is the Capitals contending core tired of failure? Are these highly skilled guys through talking tough with training camp t-shirt slogans and willing to pay the price required of NHL success? If they are, I suspect we’ll see fewer Tweet pics of night-before-games jaunts about town slinging back the Jagermeister.

• And last but not least, the ever-enduring enigma, Sasha Semin. We know what Matt Bradley thinks of him — the same as a good many Capitals’ fans. I listened all summer long to friends in media swear to me that Alexander Semin had to be traded for this team to prosper. I swore to them that (1) even if they were right, his contract (and reputation) is untradable; and (2) that George McPhee, aware of how difficult it was for this team to score last season, and how conspicuously it struggled with the power play, was going to cast his lot one last time with the world-class but oh so infuriating right wing. Alexander Semin is one of hockey’s greatest mysteries. But in the fall of 2011, it’s clear the Caps are going to live with that mystery at least one more season.

These are my big-picture wonderings heading into a new season. What are yours?

Brads, it seemed to us, didn’t come across as a recently departed player with any axe to grind. Instead, he seemed comfortable and content with his new place of employment and sufficiently distanced from D.C. to bring reasonable objectivity to his reflections. In the middle of last season this blog  identified what it considered to be grave issues with the culture of the Washington Capitals organization, and on Tuesday Matt Bradley brought this concern to the fore of his reflections, beginning around the 8:30 mark of the segment. He was specifically asked by the program’s hosts why the Caps have been unable to break through in the playoffs.

• Some of his teammates, Bradley said, “didn’t show up . . . I’ll leave them unnamed.”

• “Our locker room was maybe a little too nonchalant, and guys weren’t disciplined the way they should have been.”

• Brads also called into question the practice habits and culture of his former club — “Not being ready to practice, missing practice with questionable injuries.”

• Alexander Semin, Brads claimed, “could easily be the best player in the league but for whatever reason just doesn’t care . . . You almost get the sense . . . he wants to be back in Russia.”

Our pal Ted Starkey was about 1,500 words into a new chapter for his new book thanks to this eye-opening radio appearance.

In Monday night’s second period, with the game scoreless and the Pens holding a decisive edge in shots and scoring chances, Matt Bradley did what many in the NHL have wanted to do for years and in the process reversed the game’s momentum: he punished filthy Matt Cooke. Cooke, you’ll recall, did his level best to take out Alexander Ovechkin with an extended knee the last time these teams met. He kept up his dirty play and soon thereafter and was suspended. Matt Bradley carried a long memory into tonight’s game and waited to extract frontier justice in defense of his teammate. And despite the penalty he incurred on the hit, it was a clean hit.

Seasons of meager achievements gain meaning from such moments. And moments after Brads left the penalty box, he was forced to own up to his largely clean hit: Ryan Craig came calling, and Brads answered — in resounding fashion.

Let’s keep a close eye on what this hockey team achieves hereafter. Monday night we may have witnessed a turning point in a largely undistinguished season, and if so, Matt Bradley deserves credit.

Backstrom was the first guy to make it to Matt Cooke right after the Ovechkin hit, and aimed a left punch at Cooke before the refs stepped in.

“I was just trying to back up my boy there,” Backstrom said. “It wasn’t a nice thing he [Cooke] was doing there…I was just trying to let him know that he can’t do that.”

As we saw yesterday, hockey, even in its current incarnation, is still the  Wild West of sports — when a dirty hit only gets you two minutes in the box (like it did for Cooke), you have to police it yourself. Backstrom’s name doesn’t even register in the HockeyFights.com orbit, but several people around the team have observed that Backstrom is a guy who has your back and makes it his business to be there for you. How’s that for top line chemistry ?

Another guy who usually has your back, Matt Bradley, was the one who said something to Cooke after he came out of the box. With the media, however, Bradley was diplomatic enough for the U.N.

“He made his choice, he went to the bench, and that’s fine, but he would have done the same thing the other way around,” Bradley said.

One final note — Backstrom agreed that this was probably the most physical tilt they’ve had with the Pens yet (there was no shortage of blood gushing, though most of it seemed to be coming from the Caps’ bench) but noted that may have partially been a side effect of Pittsburgh having to play without Malkin and Crosby in the lineup, since it forced them to play the puck differently.

• “It’s like putting a plow on Secretariat” this commenter said of the Caps’ use of their anti-attack trap, and general stylistic jettisoning of what is intrinsic to the roster: speed and skill.

Wish I had thought of that. But I’m not old enough to personally remember Secretariat’s brilliance!

But what a terrific metaphor. It got me thinking: Why in the world would you invest heavily in a stable of able scouts, deploying them 5,000 or 10,000 miles across the globe, to uncover skilled skating gems like Evgeny Kuznetsev, Marcus Johansson, Mathieu Perreault, Cody Eakin, etc., if all you’re gonna do with all that talent is have it sag back in the neutral zone awaiting a counter-attack from a basically stationary position?

What a waste.

George McPhee et al in management want to “copy-cat” the success formulas of preceding Cup winners, few of whom have drafted as well as McPhee and his scouts in recent years. Fine, but don’t bother investing heavily in securing thoroughbreds in the Entry Draft when what’s required of your “copy-cat” system is merely Clydesdales.

Also, be prepared to lower your ticket prices beginning next season — appreciably. Mercifully, only 3 of the Caps’ remaining 31 games are at home against Southeast foes. Imagine marketing this team with this style of play on Tuesday and Thursday nights marching toward spring against a heavy assembly of ‘Talladega Nights’ outposts. The games are already sold out, I know; I would have been curious, however, to see how many ticket holders would have showed up for those affairs the longer this blight of a hockey season remains in place.

The bet here is that the Tampa Bay Lightning are your 2011 Southeast Division winners. Their next road game is February 27. Ten straight at home, while the Caps navigate a February that’s road-intensive and chock full of toughies. Not that this Caps’ club ever has an “easy” evening. By the end of February Tampa ought to have at least a 10-point bulge over the trapping Caps.

The Caps of course won the Southeast last season . . . by 40 points. What do we think of their second-class standing in the Southeast in 2011 when no division rival in the offseason imported Bobby Orr or Wayne Gretzky in their prime?

* * * * *

No matter what system the Capitals deploy, they’re going nowhere without a reliably productive second-line center. And the market for those over the next 30 days is going to be tight. Quite simply: there aren’t enough out-of-the-running clubs with coveted high-end assets. Seeds one through eleven are tightly packed in the East, and out West it’s even more egalitarian: Edmonton alone is truly out of it, at 38 points. I’m confident the Columbus Bluejackets — 14th in the West right now — aren’t going to qualify for the playoffs, but it’s understandable why Jackets’ management is not. They’re therefore unlikely over the next couple of weeks to part with key personnel. I’d kill to have R.J. Umberger centering the Caps’ second line. He’s a big body — and the Caps desperately need to be bigger down the middle — who can skate and score, and he has a notable Eastern conference pedigree of achievement. He wouldn’t be a rental, and his salary ($3.75 million) isn’t out of line for his position and numbers. Umberger would be my dream acquisition. Fairly notable dropoff in production with say Ottawa’s Mike Fisher, but his entourage would bring some buzz to Kettler morning skates.

But then you confront the problem on the right side of the Capitals’ lineup. Mike Knuble hasn’t looked effective all season long; in fact, he’s beginning to look like most 38-year-old hockey players look in this league. Eric Fehr is on the shelf probably another month, but even when he was healthy he underwhelmed this season. Jason Chimera is, by default, skating on the Capitals’ top line. I think the Capitals need to skate the remainder of the season putting all their chips on the top line (8-19-28), try and make Scott Howson an offer he can’t refuse for Umberger — assuming the Jackets tread water the next three weeks — stash Knuble on the second line, and reassemble the best line of training camp: Chimera-Perreault-Fehr on the third unit. Rookie Marcus Johansson’s minutes and duties are going to have to be managed expertly as the season takes on greater significance; I’ve little confidence in the club doing that, given how they’ve handled MJ90 to date. A Hendricks-Johansson-Bradley fourth line could be fun to watch. I’d dress Dave Steckel as an extra forward and let him take defensive zone faceoffs. (I’ve little use for him in five-on-five play anyway.)

Problem is, as constructed, this hypothetical lineup I’ve posited is one that’d actually be interested in attacking with the puck, in skating, in scoring goals. The current Capitals are not.

It’s also a chance for reporters to ask serious questions about fashion, eating, and motherly advice.  As always, the guys were good sports.

There were two main areas to the event – a foyer, where silent auction items were displayed (including a Crosby jersey–one bid was for 2 cents), and the ballroom itself, where the food (including a nitrogen ice cream bar), band, and most of the gambling was.  Browsing the silent auction table made defenseman Tyler Sloan  our first unsuspecting victim.

The first question: which Capital has the biggest fashion budget?

“Ovie probably spends the most money, or [Alexander] Semin,” Sloan said. “That doesn’t mean that he looks good.”

“There’s a big difference,” Matt Bradley explained later.

He gave an example: “Ovie and Semin and Greenie probably spend the most, but Nicky [Backstrom] looks the best.”

American John Carlson sent the compliment back across the border…briefly.

“Matt Bradley’s a very well-dressed guy,” Carlson said, then jokingly added, “I like to think of myself as pretty well-dressed.”

Sloan also made a case for himself then turned diplomatic, first complimenting the Swedes, then praising “the European look” before finally giving Canadian Brooks Laich’s suits a shoutout.

Asking Sloan who had the biggest appetite on the team produced a very different answer.

“Jay Beagle,” Sloan said almost immediately. “He actually can eat non-stop…He eats really slowly, so it seems like he’s always eating.” OFB was unable to independently confirm that report (no OFB eyewitnesss of Beagle spotted at the nitrogen ice cream bar), but, considering the source, we’re convinced it’s a reliable account. Bradley could only tell us that Beagle drank a lot of shakes.

Meanwhile, over at the Wii bowling station, Ovechkin was busy doing something that’s more rare than normal in his career – losing.  Capitals fan Craig Seaman had put in $60 towards charity for a chance to play with the team captain and ended up beating him soundly.

“He was actually playing like Sidney Crosby,” Seaman joked. “It was kind of funny because he was really into the game, you know. You could tell he was really into the challenge.”

Seaman said he actually met his wife Deanna, also in attendance, at a Capitals game –she had a game she couldn’t go to, so she stopped him walking by and asked if he wanted the tickets. Seaman said one day he’d like to buy the actual seats off of Ted Leonsis.

Deanna said her favorite players are Semin, Chimera, and Knuble, while her husband chose Jason Chimera, Matt Hendricks, and Bradley.

Bradley told OFB he gets recognized only very rarely when he steps out of the house; Sloan  said he may get recognized once in awhile but separated himself from the “rockstars” of the team.

“Ovie and Backstrom and Green, and they’re on commercials, they’re on TV,” Sloan said, after which, of course, I made the obligatory reference to Ovechkin’s Eastern Motors commercial.

“Would you do a commercial, if someone asked?” I asked Sloan.

“I drive a Jeep Cherokee, maybe I’ll do a commercial for [that],” Sloan said.

I also learned something else at the casino night – Boudreau should be doing way more commercials than he already is.  In addition to the silent auction, there was a live auction, where if you just happened to have $10,000 lying around, you could get a one-hour private skating lesson for twenty people with Assistant Coach Bob Woods, Mike Green, Semyon Varlamov, Brooks Laich, and Matt Hendricks. You could have a wine night with the Steckels, Knubles, and Boudreaus for $11,250. There was even a Segway tour with Matt Bradley and other Capitals players.

But the funniest bidding round came for the infamous coaches’ party at Boudreau’s house.  The auctioneer began the bid, but Boudreau stepped in to help him out and soon had the crowd roaring.

“The date is whatever you want it to be,” Boudreau told the crowd, discarding the announced date for the party as his wife shook her head no. He promised an epic event, complete with game-watching and a colorful vocabulary (that we’re sure could only be aired on HBO…oh, wait). He offered to throw in a few players to the invite list. He volunteered to let people to stay over if their alcohol intake made a drive home impossible.

As two bidders got stuck right around the $12,000 mark, he showed how masterful he was. He said that if each side threw in $12500 (I believe that was the final amount), they could both come with the specified number of guests. Sold.

In the midst of all this lightheartedness, we did actually ask one serious question of John Carlson. Before the Winter Classic, his mother shared with us the advice she said her father gave her and that she had tried to pass on to John: always remember who you are, aka, stay humble.

Carlson recognized the piece of advice immediately. In fact, he said he remembered hearing it from his grandfather as well.

This, of course, led to our last frivolous question of the night. What’s the piece of advice from his mom that he ignores the most?

“Probably clean your room,” Carlson said.

And Matt Bradley, playing in the OHL, won the William Hanley Award as the league’s most gentlemanly player (an award also won by Wayne Gretzky exactly two decades before). The player that Washington Capitals fans now know and love as a checking, occasionally brawling, blue-collar presence was only in three fights that year.

It’s a testament to a player’s desire to make it in the NHL that Bradley altered his game from a guy who didn’t have to fight to become a give-it-all-you-got fourth-liner who scores points with fans  by jumping to his teammates’ defense (case in point: last year’s classic duel with Steve Downie, where Bradley stepped in for Alex Ovechkin).

“I used to be a skill guy,” Bradley told me recently. “Then I realized I didn’t have enough skill and had to change my game.”

Bradley explained that while many players begin as the top guys on their junior teams, succeeding at a higher level of play requires a player to figure out where he’s most valuable to his team, do that well, and make sure he doesn’t try to fill a role that he can’t oblige.

From his head coach’s perspective, Bradley seems to be living by his own words.

“Matt Bradley knows his job,” Bruce Boudreau said earlier this season. “He knows when to do it and how to do it. Whether he wins or loses, he competes . . . That was probably the only time I did cheer [when the Caps beat New Jersey 7-2 in October], when Matt did okay in that fight. David Clark[son] is a really tough individual. Matt sometimes, doesn’t matter who he’s fighting, when he does fight, big or small – and it’s usually bigger than him — and he still puts his nose in there and does what he has to do.”

Bradley says he remembers his first fight came at the end of his first year of junior hockey. But he doesn’t remember the opponent and answers “probably not” when asked if he won.

“I never really fought before, and I was nervous, but you kind of have to learn as you go,” he said.

Since then, the stats make it look like he’s become a little more comfortable: he actually has more NHL fights than goals, although he prefers to reflect on the latter. He’s logged the most bouts against the Florida Panthers, according to the HockeyFights website. And while he doesn’t necessarily win all of them, his effort and work ethic during games is always top-line worthy.

Bradley went over a few key points of fighting like a gentleman: (1) Let the guy get his gloves off first before throwing a punch; (2) If a guy falls, you just don’t hit him when he’s down; (3) If someone asks you to fight (and vice versa), and you say no, then it’s left at that.  Though in the heat of the game, Bradley added, all bets are off.

• Want the biggest indication Semin’s game is changing? He stayed out of the penalty box on a night when the Capitals got called for five in fractions.

• Semin’s hat trick Thursday was his second one of the season and the fifth of his career (the NHL record is held by The Great One, of course, who scored 10 hat tricks in a single season twice in his career.) He also had an assist on the Capitals’ first goal of the night, scored by Tom Poti in his first game back since Oct. 21, and got off a shot on goal during a Capitals’ PK.  Seriously, Alexander Ovechkin has somehow taken over Semin’s body (minus the hard checks) — there is no stopping Sasha II right now.  “We’ll ride it as long as it goes,” head coach Bruce Boudreau said of Semin’s Midas touch, and added that Semin likes having the added responsibility that comes from playing on the top line with Nicklas Backstrom and Ovechkin.

• That being said, it took Semin and his teammates more than a period to get on the scoreboard, and the Capitals didn’t score 4 of their 6 goals until the third period. The second goal was one of the most awkwardly-gorgeous goals of the season: for some reason, the Lightning thought they needed three players around Tomas Fleischmann fighting for the puck, which a fly-by Knuble picked up, then lost back briefly to Tampa.  Brooks Laich recovered, shot, missed, and the rebound was somehow tapped in by Knuble from way behind the cage. Ovechkin (three points on the evening) also had one of the 6 goals, but it came late in the third period after Semin already put the Caps ahead.

• Rebound: This pretty much described the Capitals’ game Thursday, the strengths and the weaknesses. The score could easily have been 3-0 in Tampa’s favor before the end of the first. Michal Neuvirth wasn’t controlling the rebounds initially, which led to some juicy chances for Tampa and contributed to them going up 1-0 in the first 20 minutes.  The good news is the Capitals bounced back in the end, but their coach isn’t letting them get away with the delayed scoring.”They got crap in between periods,” Boudreau said of his first intermission messaging to his Capitals’ charges.

• Everyone’s talking about the Caps’ new and improved division opponent, who boasts the league’s leading goal scorer in Steven Stamkos. Stamkos has a goals and an assist on the evening — the goal came late in the third period and too late to help his team pull back. He’s a dynamic player, and likely to get even better.

• Matt Bradley: The guy delivers a great (clean!) hit on Tampa defenseman Mike Lundin, which somehow justifies Adam Hall skating all the way over and going after Bradley, who introduced Hall to the face of the ice in relatively short order. Our press box colleague Ed Frankovic was one of those (along with Boudreau) who questioned whether Hall should have received an instigator penalty, but Boudreau said afterwards that Bradley saw Hall coming, which apparently made Hall’s transgressions not worthy of additional minutes in the referees’ eyes.

• Were you Gabby you’d try and bottle up this effort and commitment by 20 guys in your sweater and uncork it for every road contest. But what made it work so well? The absence of perimeter play. The decisive goals in this game were scored in the tough neighborhood. You saw the Caps’ fourth line in Cam Ward’s grill most of the night, but you also saw a commitment to drive to the net by Jason Chimera and Eric Fehr and Brooks Laich, and even the Caps’ first line, while it struggled in the game’s first half to get its groove going, and still isn’t firing on all cylinders, begin chipping pucks deep and establishing its difficult-to-defend low cycle. “Easily our most complete game,” Gabby claimed.

• The ‘Canes didn’t play poorly — except perhaps on the power play. And were it not for Neuvirth’s heroics, Eric Staal could easily have had a hat trick. Still, the Caps hit two pipes in the first period (Alexander Semin hot another in the final frame), or this game could have broken open wide in the first frame.

• The game’s goaltenders seriously shined. That Cam Ward can backstop Carolina to a playoff berth. This Michal Neuvirth, earning his first-ever NHL shutout, may get himself lodged in Vezina discussion, soon. Jim Carrey holds the record for wins by a Caps’ rookie goal (18, in 1994-95), and Neuvy is already a third of the way there.

• The Caps of course were perfect on the penalty kill, and a lot of that specialty unit’s success fed off of great work by the pivots taking draws. They seemed to win every draw deep in their end while shorthanded. Tomas Fleischmann won the first six draws he took on the evening. Dave Steckel had a perfect record on the dot for a while. All of the pivots performed well there. And you saw how instrumental faceoff acumen is to the penalty kill.

• The Caps moved back into the top five in the league on the PK by virtue of last night’s effort. Nine games into 2010-11 they are killing off 90 percent of their short-handed situations. That’ll work.

• Having Mike Green returned helps, too. In a game like last night’s, when so much of the middle of the ice was clogged by design, Greener’s poise and dangle affords the Caps an invaluable forecheck-relieving safety valve. MG52 had the puck on a string quite a bit last night, and it was fun to watch. The penalty he was called for on Staal late in the third — and what I saw was more shoulder going into Staal than leg — was one I’d have him take every time on an elite power forward late in a tight game.

• Matt Bradley won’t ever draw the notice for being in or out of the lineup the way Greener will, but his Old Time Hockey ethos was a catalyst again for the unsung efforts of Boudreau’s fourth line last night. I’d have awarded three hard hats to the fourth line for last night. Boudreau began the game with his energy-and-lunchpail outfit, and that opening shift set a workmanlike tone that was replicated shift after shift after shift. You saw the head coach roll four lines consistently. Commitment and work ethic, when absorbed by an entire bench, can be a beautifully ugly weapon. Especially on the road.

Matt Bradley talks to OFB after an informal veterans' skate at Kettler. Photo by OFB's Alexander Perlmutter.

“I think this year is kind of do or die,” Bradley said at Kettler Monday. “We have to make something happen.”

Bradley said having a young son in the house is forcing him up a bit earlier in the morning and to bed a little earlier at night, but his approach to offseason conditioning remains as intense as his teammates without family commitments.

“I have to work out just as hard or harder,” Bradley said. “It’s a contract year for me, and obviously we [the Capitals] weren’t happy the way we finished, so I think we all probably worked out harder than normal just because we have something to prove this year.”

OFB also asked Bradley to clear the record on something – his official bio on the Washington Capitals website says Tiger Woods is his favorite athlete.

“I’m a bandwagon guy – my new favorite golfer is Dustin Johnson,” said Bradley, while acknowledging Woods’ athletic ability. “The way he [Johnson] dealt with the two big losses throughout this year…it’s pretty neat and to see him come back and win this weekend, was pretty incredible.”

(If you’re like me and don’t follow golf, here’s the coolest article on Dustin Johnson I could find.)