My kingdom for a competent line change! A horrific line change ended game 2; game 3′s first power play, which produced an ever elusive goal for the Caps with the extra man, ended prematurely because of . . . a poor line change. Which of course washed out Mike Knuble’s goal.

Naturally, Bruce Boudreau, in his postgame reflections, focused on how Alexander Semin’s unsanctioned presence on the ice then didn’t really impact the play. Here’s a relevant area of inquiry, coach:  How is it that for a third consecutive game in this series your team didn’t show up for the third period?

How many poor line changes have you seen from Tampa in this series? This is a symptom, somewhat small but oh so telling, of why regime change must follow this series. The good ones get the little things right, the fundamentals of the game — always.

More than a few observers, including some inside the Capitals’ organization, weren’t comforted by what HBO cameras revealed of the Capitals’ head coach, especially relative to the portrait of the Penguins’ bench boss. That, too, is worth meditating on this rainy Washington Wednesday morning.

At OFB we change lines just fine. Our Young Guns reflect on another sour night in spring for the team in red:

Alex:

• I am as clueless as Mike Knuble, the rest of the Caps, and probably all of you as to how this ended the way it did. Weren’t the Caps supposed to be a composed and formidable defensive team? I thought, just as Joe B pointed out at the end of the second period, that this was probably the best 2011 playoff game the Capitals skated this season.

• It’s amazing what a gifted goal can do to a team’s spirits, as not only was Eric Fehr’s third period clearing attempt picked right off the boards but Scott Hannan lazily attempted a poke check instead of separating Steven Stamkos from the puck or getting his body in the way of the shot. Michal Neuvirth, despite brilliant play throughout the game, should have had that one; it just wasn’t a playoff goal. Three mistakes by three players in the span of about three seconds is not playoff hockey, and that play is why the Caps lost this game.

• Bounces? Yes, Tampa has had their fair share. But those bounces are created by hard work down low and strong board play, which in this blogger’s opinion has decisively been Tampa’s strongest asset, not the 1-3-1. The 1-3-1 is a preventative strategy in hockey — one variation of the trap — but it’s not a play to rely on all the time. When the Caps are in the offensive zone after hurdling the passive Tampa trap, they have to go to the corners, the boards, and behind the net, where they are simply ineffective. Tampa, meanwhile, has worked immaculately in the corners and quickly moves the puck towards the net.

• The Caps could lessen their perimeter play a lot more and send pucks on goal as soon as they get the puck below the circles. When a team is settling into their defensive formation on a given play, they are at their most vulnerable. The Caps seem to want to establish dominance in their zone and throw Tampa’s defense off balance. Their composure, however, has been the Caps’ undoing.

• Examine the Caps’ goals from last night, not counting the Ovechkin 5-on-3 PP goal. Carlson’s goal was scored by a rushing Jason Chimera, who beat the trap and rushed the puck down low and around the net. He saw a screen develop in front and fortunately flipped it out high to Carlson for the screened shot. Knuble’s goal was almost identical except Ovechkin, after beating Hedman wide, threw the puck on goal and a fortunate bounce leveled the score. All of Tampa’s goals except Stamkos’ were scored right around the blue paint from plays developing below the circles (St. Louis’ assist on Lecavalier’s goal, Thompson’s assist on Malone’s goal) and because of some very sloppy exits (Fehr on Stamkos’ goal, Erskine/Laich on Bergenheim’s goal).

• All that said, why aren’t the Capitals getting more pucks on net? They are simply getting outhustled and outworked in this series, particularly Semin and Backstrom, and particularly along the boards. These guys have yet to show up in the series and Semin is especially due for some positive streakiness against the club he torched in the regular season.

• On the topic of the regular season, Tampa was a minus goal differential the whole year until the last week or so of the season. I am baffled, as bewildered as Mike Knuble, by Tampa’s system working so effectively against Ovie & Co. Teams adapt and Boudreau should have only needed that Game 1 loss to solve Guy Boucher’s men. If DC doesn’t push this a la 2011 Chicago or 2010 Philly, there will be no hot saucy shirts to joke about come October. Maybe come the weekend.

Andrew

Excuses. They are what separate the championship caliber teams from the championship pretenders. Unfortunately for the Caps, they are in the second category.

The time has come for answers in Washington, not more questions. After their catastrophic Game 3 loss to the Tampa Bay Lightning, Head Coach Bruce Boudreau brought up that he thought a Tampa goal should have been disallowed. That is a hollow, vacuous excuse, and saying “we lost because they had a goal that shouldn’t have counted” is nothing more than saying we have no explanation for what happened. There are any number of answers that could have been given as to why the Caps are down 0-3. None of them have to do with one Lightning goal.

• When looking at the game as a whole, really the series as a whole, how does a team with the skill level of the Caps allow a line change to cost them Game 2 in overtime? Beyond that though, how do they then let a line change cost them a huge goal in the early going of the very next game?

• Expanding on these coaching points though: how does a team like the Caps, a team that has played the Lightning more than any other team in these playoffs, not look prepared coming into one of the most important playoff series in their history? Tampa Bay is certainly a good team, but they should be nowhere close to the Caps in terms of overall team strength. Tampa of course has an Elite Three if you will, just as Washington does. Is there any doubt who among St. Louis, Stamkos and Lecavalier versus Ovechkin, Backstrom and Semin is bringing more to their respective team in this series?

• Guy Boucher never seems satisfied, never seems content with the status-quo and always seems like he knows his team can do more. And you know what? I think his team likes that and respects that.

• In the first half of this series — of which there appears there will be no second half — Boucher has spoken in glowing terms of forward pairings he’s relied upon all season: Lecavalier and Purcell, St. Louis and Stamkos. What a novel concept — maintaining cohesion and chemistry among your line pairings.

• He has also spoken of the “great character” his core guys possess. Me = envious.

• The never-ending story of the last three springs has been that the Caps have underachieved. Well, from looking at what was said after Tuesday’s loss we can all see why. Instead of saying the team can play better and needs to perform up to their pay grade, Bruce Boudreau is talking about a goal that should have been waived off.

• Amazingly, with nearly a week off to prepare, the Capitals in this series have looked unprepared, from the get-go, not rested, not ready and just plain bad. Washington looks like a barely .500 team. Meanwhile the Lightning look like world beaters and have taken the mighty Capitals and made them the just a stepping stone to the Eastern Conference Finals.

• How did Tampa Bay get where they are this morning, you may ask? I’m not sure it’s the stuff of Special Ops secrets. Likely reasons: lots of hard work, dedication, cohesion, faith and trust in their systems, and certainly astute if precocious coaching.

• How did the Caps get to where they are down three in a series many picked them to win in five? Through deficient work ethic, a sense of entitlement rivaling that we saw against Montreal last spring, the core (excepting Ovechkin) coming up small, and a ridiculous lack of desperation, all things Bruce Boudreau has never seemed to work to fix. Now they are on the verge of the end of their season if they don’t win tonight, and the end of an era if they don’t win the series.

One last thought: today brings yet another optional practice for the Caps. It would be interesting to go back over say the past three seasons and inventory the number of days taken off by this team’s stars — especially with respect to optional skates — and compare the tally against stars from clubs who prosper is spring.

In the service of honesty, I will open two crucial caveats. First, I am a Caps’ fan, but I have lost the fanatic team loyalty of my youth, when I would videotape and rerun Greg Maddux on the mound for the Atlanta Braves during my teenage years or when I convinced myself that the Buffalo Bills lost their fourth Superbowl in part because I unfroze my clenched lotus position during halftime to eat dinner. I follow the Caps, I follow hockey in general, I’ve loved this blog . . . but my fandom is one primarily of player-attachment (I have a great fondness for Ovi) and a general sense of teams or players I like (the Caps, Brooks Laich, the Wings) and teams or players I can’t stand (the Rangers, Matt Cooke, Alex Semin when he seems like he doesn’t care). So, this post resonates more with the lovely meditation on Montréal hockey culture recently posted by pucksandbooks than a close reading of Holtby vs. Varalamov vs. Neuvirth. (Although, I do allege that the Holtby demotion is nonsensical.)

The second caveat? I am a doctoral student in English literature living in Manhattan. Which explains why I’m going to quote William Wordsworth on how to write poetry. (Sorry.) The key, he says, is to write only after a profound experience in order to best capture “emotions recollected from tranquility.” Have the upheaval, be boulversé if we’re going to be bi-lingual, and analyze it later. And that’s what I’m trying my best to do here.

I had the opportunity, through a conference, to score a ticket for the Habs-Caps game on March 26. I was pretty high up in the third tier of Centre Bell, and yet the night was one of the most exciting of my life. Language is always a futile effort at capturing experience, but I shall try to do it justice.

To begin: Centre Bell, simply, is hockey’s Mecca. I could have spent hours documenting each of these: the Canadiens Hall-of-Fame exhibition inside; the courtyard filled with statues dedicated to “Rocket” Richard, et al, and paved with marble slabs celebrating the Canadiens “100 Meilleurs Moments”; and, especially moving, the walls of team photographs dating back to about 1915. In literature, there is a term called a synecdoche, in which a part of something represents the whole thing (i.e., an arm for a whole human being). The Canadiens are the synecdoche of hockey, I think. They embody the sport completely, even as they transcend it, and Centre Bell is their shrine. And, thus, it is hockey’s shrine, too.

The game, frankly, was mediocre. The first Caps goal occurred so quickly — a Habs fan behind me had ironically urged his team seconds before it happened to “wake up, please” — that the rest of the game seemed anti-climatic. The Habs couldn’t pass the puck, and the fact that the Caps averaged a 2:1 ratio of shots on goal indicates something of the atmosphere of futility. The Habs appeared beaten very early on, and they lived down to those expectations.

But, honestly? It didn’t matter. At a shrine, the idols matter less than the faithful who worship them. And the fans were stunning. Perhaps the most interesting — and, I think, most important — observation I made was that, while the lowest and thus most expensive level of seating (the 100s) had a few chairs empty every now and then, the 200s and especially the 300s were utterly full. I can bet that the 400s above me were the same. While I cannot claim to understand Montréal’s demographic by scanning a hockey rink, Centre Bell seemed populated by true rouge-blanc-et-bleu-collar fans. No corporate suites and company tickets here. These fans alternately cheered, cajoled, and finally booed their team with such vigor, even at the bitter end when the Caps’ final goal sealed the deal late in the third. And while those in the 100s flooded out in droves in the final five minutes, no one around me moved an inch until the final five seconds — even the grandmother and parents of the young woman who sold me the ticket. They had come in from New Brunswick and happily informed me that they were, in fact, Penguins fans.

Living in New York, I know something about the pressure fans put on their teams to succeed. The Habs aren’t the Yankees of hockey; the Yankees are a watered-down version of the Habs. The city of Montréal, 1 million plus strong, exists for this team. New Yorkers exist to complain, so even when the Yanks or the Giants lose, there is a certain pleasure in the ability to lay blame and be coolly jaded.

This is purely impossible for Habs fans, I think. And, as I watched their team bumble around on the ice, missing passes right and left and seemingly lacking the confidence to shoot the “%&@# puck!” (to paraphrase my neighbors), I couldn’t help but feel like this team was, well, Hab-less. Pardon the horrible pun, but it fits. With the Canadiens, it’s not a matter of a standard to live up to (La Coupe Stanley). The Canadiens can only be defined as the best team in hockey. Anytime these players fall short, they cease to be Habs. They wear the jerseys, but as with Macbeth, they don’t fill them: “like a giant’s robe/Upon a dwarfish thief.” I cannot surmise how the players withstand this pressure.

I confess: I wanted the Habs to score. (2-1 Caps would have been perfect.) I wanted the experience of the faithful reacting with ecstasy. That would have tipped me over the edge, too, I think. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

A final observation: sometime in the first period, the scoreboard focused on a young boy no more than ten years old. The Canadiens “welcome John W. Leopold,” it read, as he smiled and squirmed with joyful embarrassment. Underneath? “Family Season Ticket Holders Since 1950.” Exactly.

I know all about the winter allure of Montreal’s frozen parks. A few years back, I went long-winter-weekending in Montreal in pursuit of a pretty girl. I took lodging in her apartment for the weekend. We were sipping coffee early on Saturday morning when I looked out her window and saw what looked to be a petroleum tanker pull up in the park near her apartment complex, and park near sturdy boards encasing a sizable oval for shinny. Seconds later the tanker driver fire-hosed hot water out onto the ice to form a perfect sheet. To this day I can vividly recall the white steam rising up from the ice as the scalding hot water worked its healing upon the preceding day’s skate scars. I remember how patiently and evenly the municipal employee spread the water out over the rink. It seemed a labor of true love. It speaks volumes about my bachelordom I think that I unpacked my gear bag after finishing coffee and went out on that sheet alone with a couple of pucks for hours instead of wooing the pretty Montrealer. It’s probably true: I used her for her neighborhood shinny sheet.

More winter-friendly charms: Montreal has never embraced basketball, and it’s rejected baseball. From this vantage, it strikes me as a hockey culture vastly superior to Toronto. But Montreal is also just plain colder than Toronto. Which is heart-warming to me.

Did you know that if you live in Montreal and purchase cable television that you cannot access ESPN? Boo-yaah! This is true of course all across Canada, but when Montreal native Ben Raby shared this tidbit with me a couple of weeks ago as we rode up to Hershey together for a Bears’ practice I felt an instant urge to immigrate North. It was during this recent Friday morning puck pilgrimage with Raby that I went Woodward and Bernstein on him about his hometown. I wanted him to regale me in all facets of his upbringing up North that spoke to hockey’s religious hold there. Which he did. This is what I learned:

• Just about every park has not one but two sheets of ice well maintained all winter long. One sheet is for shinny, the other for recreational skating. Well maintained.

• Here in Washington children at recess play basketball or soccer or toss around a football, but in Montreal, even the young girls will join in gymnasium floor hockey, or blacktop street hockey, and seldom do they allow Montreal’s frigid winter temps to keep them from facing off.

• No small number of teenagers make a habit of watching Habs’ games as ritual prelude to pursuing what we customarily expect teens to do in their evening leisure — take in movies, loiter at malls and shops, party together.

• Habs’ fashion is popular with young girls. They are the wearers of pink jerseys and traditional Habs’ colors. And teens are conspicuous today at Bell Centre, which has occasioned what Raby termed a genuine culture change in Montreal’s home rink. Old Montreal Forum was famous for its business suits and fedoras encircling the 100 level, and for being patronized by a distinctly mature adult fanbase. Over the past decade or so the replacement rink has become distinctly younger. Subsequently, more raucous.

• Saturdays in season on Sainte-Catherine Street are Mardi Gras for Montrealers before Habs’ home games.

From autumn through spring, beginning even before the formal start of training camp, the Habs are story number one, two, and three for Montreal’s sports media. I specifically posed to Raby this hypothetical: Imagine that the CFL Alouettes were victorious in the Grey Cup while on the same autumn Saturday night the Habs skated in a relatively meaningless regular season game against Columbus. (Not that one would ever posit a hockey game’s being “meaningless” out loud while within Montreal’s city limits.) What’s the section front of the Gazette or La Presse gonna look like on Sunday morning? Raby conceded that the CFLers would earn top billing above the fold, but he added, there’d be no bumping of the Habs off the section front.

Hockey town, hockey culture, hockey heaven. I miss it most in March.

photo courtesy of Ben Raby

photo courtesy of Ben Raby

photo courtesy of Ben Raby

photo courtesy of Ben Raby

photo courtesy of Ben Raby

photo couresty of Ben Raby

photo courtesy of Ben Raby

photo courtesy of Ben Raby

Approaching Heinz Field from the ferry on game night - photo by Julianne Sobral

Driving up to Pittsburgh on Friday afternoon was like driving 75 miles per hour down 7th Street. Mile upon mile of Capital clad cars honking “Let’s Go Caps!” amped the expectations of my brother and me for what we already thought would be a spectacular weekend. Giving those three BEEPs to Red Army passersby lifted me heading into enemy territory knowing full well I was going to spend New Years eve CouchSurfing with complete strangers.

CouchSurfing is a a bit of a social experiment best described as hospitality sharing. Essentially members just crash on another member’s couch, having previously contacted them through the website and arranged a stay. My brother Patrick is a member who has hosted and used the website extensively during a road trip to Texas in summer. Wearing a bright red Capitals shirt, I cautiously and anxiously knocked on the door to my host Amanda’s house in Upper Lawrenceville, Pittsburgh. She answered the door, looked down at the logo, and said, “Oh!” with some surprise (and I’m sure a little disgust), but the 24-pack of Peroni we bought for her mended any qualms quickly.

Patrick and I quickly settled in and explored the city by car, in particular stopping at Mt. Washington, an enormous overlook of Pittsburgh on the Monongahela River. For all the cracks I hear about Pittsburghers wanting to get the hell out of the city’s dreariness — and the fact that there are throngs of Steelers fans everywhere only aids that hypothesis — I can’t help but wonder why in the DC area there exists such a negative image of Steel City. Pittsburgh is gorgeous, even in its habitual cloudy gloom. Go to the top of Mt. Washington and please tell me if you think Pittsburgh is awful. While we were bound to run into hecklers at some point, and we did mostly around game time, the overwhelming majority of Pittsburghers treated my brother and me extremely well. On game day we were walking on South Side, an area lined with bars, and chatted with a few Pens’ fans in their early 20s who asked us if we were going to the game and saying that it was going to be awesome, holding their tongues on wishing us good luck.

But let’s skip back 18 hours. New Years Eve started off with some unpalatable Thai fish (I won’t mention the restaurant’s name) and ended with the some of the best guacamole I’ve ever tasted, homemade by our hostess. That is to say the night only got better as it went on. The characters that showed up to Amanda’s house for her New Years party were unique and like no one I had ever met. I chatted with Frank, a baker, about Crosby/Ovechkin for a while and Jordan, who works in Audio/Video at Heinz Field, gave us some insider information about Jimmy Fallon’s appearance among other tidbits. The only reason he as at the party was because of the game’s delay. Not only that, but I was still wearing that Caps shirt and no one wrote anything on my forehead after I officially surfed the couch. Later on in the evening Frank, Jordan, and Amanda collaboratively jammed with a xylophone, a flute and a beatbox machine creating an astoundingly creative and inspiring New Years anthem. I hope I made a good impression on them because they certainly did on me. I’m still a bit amazed by CouchSurfing and opening your home to strangers, but if I can do it in Pittsburgh on the eve of the Winter Classic, I feel anyone can do it anywhere, any time. It’s like-minded people doing something they like, meeting new folks.

Patrick and I headed to South Side at around 3 p.m. on 1/1/11, and a few hours later and several pints heavier made our way to the game by ferry in a group of eight, four Caps’ fans and four Pens’ fans. From our seats in Section 115, we could see about one-third of the rink and watched most of the game on the jumbotron. Still, it was totally worth it. The only other away game I have attended was at Bell Centre in Montreal, almost three years ago to the day, and while I don’t want to say the Classic surpassed it (Montreal’s hockey culture can’t be usurped), I will say this experience took hockey to another level even if I couldn’t see that much. On that January 5th, 2008, evening in Montreal, Mike Green scored in OT to land the Caps a 5-4 win. In that game it was nice to see the six other Caps fans cheering among 21,000. In this game it was incredible to see a Verizon Center-plus worth of Caps’ fans cheering. A lot has changed for this club in the past four seasons.

Two and a half hours later and regular season bragging rights in the bag for another month or so, we departed swiftly in a largely subdued crowd. Many Caps’ fans were silent outside Heinz Field after the game, possibly out of respect or fatigue, and it didn’t look like there was an atmosphere for celebration at all. While a historic first night Winter Classic was amazing, many seemed reluctant to celebrate late in the evening. If it had gone on at 1 p.m. as scheduled, perhaps the mood would have been more lively and festivities could have gone on well into the evening.

On a weekend I CouchSurfed for the first time, our beloved Red did a first in a ‘City of Firsts’ — win a game in a football stadium. For me though, the game is another game — two points. The Winter Classic is widely described as the second biggest stage in hockey, behind the playoffs. I wholeheartedly believe that the win showed our team is not relying merely on our big guns for the offensive push this season; that we can beat arguably the best team in the last four years on a big stage. We showed character New Years Day, and the Caps and their supporters can only hope that’s the last piece to the Stanley Cup puzzle.

More and more it appears that the high-octane, high-scoring Capitals of 2008-November 2010 are morphing into a substance-over-style squad. Henceforth the nightly returns in Chinatown will be more of the 2-1/3-2 variety. Might as well get used to it; that’s what’s required of teams in spring.

“It’s a new way for us to play,” Bruce Boudreau told media last night.

We’re trading in our Ferrari for a Subaru.

Beauty is becoming a beast.

Once we wooed only the pretty girls; now we’re chasing heifers.

We’re going ugly, gang, ’cause it’s the best bet for next spring.

* * * * *

This is a big deal. This is a cultural transformation — both on the ice but especially for the Red Army. Capitals hockey the past three seasons has been about coveted admission to razzle-dazzle on ice. No more.

Photo by Clyde Caplan, clydeorama.com

Once the Caps secured a 2-0 lead last night, guess how many skaters they consistently had clogging the neutral zone? Five. That’s called a trap. How spectacularly ironic: in these teams’ first meeting since last April’s upset, the Habs last night were frustrated to death by a trapping Capitals club.

Credit the braintrust of the most storied and revered franchise in hockey history for hatching the scheme to defeat Bruce Boudreau’s career-defining attack last spring. The rest of the league caught on this fall. Now Gabby is attempting to redefine his career — and save it in the process — by re-engineering his system. Radically.

Montreal needed a miracle to topple the league’s best team last April. The Habs found two: Jaroslav Halak and 20 skaters willing to buy into Martin’s stifling system. On Tuesday TBD identified the Caps’ first-round upset at the skates of the Habs as Washington’s most disappointing sports news story of 2010. Hard to argue with that.

And so it was fascinating on Tuesday night to watch Bruce Boudreau’s collection of highly skilled forwards purposely shoot wide of Montreal defenders, retrieve the pucks dumped behind them, and get their noses dirty in tight. Pucks went deep, hungry lunch-pailers went hunting after them — worth noting, many of them were on recall from Hershey (more on that in a moment) — life in front of Carey Price was congested and chock full of confusion, and ugly hockey blossomed before our eyes.

* * * * *

And did you notice . . . how quiet Verizon Center was last night? It was as if a Southeast tenant had arrived for an October friendly. Instead it was the hated Habs. But ugly hockey doesn’t breed painted faces, and it certainly isn’t likely to unleash any fury. This is going to be an adjustment, gang. Big time. To my friends Goat and Horn Guy: 2011 is going to bring your biggest challenge to date.

* * * * *

When the Capitals acquired Scott Hannan I theorized that ultimately he was destined to be paired with Mike Green and afford Greener a stability and reliability of partner our back-end engine’s never known. The last three games have perhaps afforded Capitals’ fans a preview of precisely this. They’ve been Hannan’s three best games in a Capitals’ sweater. He’s been partnered with Green. They’ve logged a ton of minutes. They are beginning to look quite good together.

But so, too, are John Carlson and Karl Alzner. That duo was over 20 minutes each Tuesday night. The Caps at long last could possibly have a quality top four they’ve yet to compete in the postseason with under Bruce Boudreau. And if the third pairing is a Schultz-Poti-Erskine combo, that’s hardly a huge dropoff in reliability.

* * * * *

If Jay Beagle’s played a better game than Tuesday’s in his professional hockey career, I’d like to have a DVD of it.

“There’s a guy making a great bid to stay here,” Bruce Boudreau said of his hound dog afterward. “His work ethic is second to none.”

The Hershey reinforcements, the coach noted, “are pushing our practices.”

More and more this thought is marinating in my head nearing the midpoint of this hockey season: if this is a regular season of indeterminate meaning and motivation for the Capitals’ contending core, among which so, so many are slumping for so protracted a period, this team may already be indebted to its recall ranks for saving the season. And breathing much-needed life into it. Who seemed to save the season in Ottawa 10 days ago? MP85. The very next outing, against the bottom-dwelling Devils, who among the hosts shined brightest? The Jay Beagle-Dave Steckel-Andrew Gordon line. Matty struck again to get things started in Carolina on Sunday night before exiting with injury after just two shifts. And Tuesday night Jay Beagle was a beast. The Caps have won four of their last five games, and in all four wins Hershey reinforcements have played star- and hard-hat-earning roles.

* * * * *

Interesting question, I think: how good a fit—short term and long—is Alexander Semin for this Capitals’ evolution?