There’s standup, and then there’s what Gabby offered the Washington Post’s Tarik El Bashir Wednesday morning — actually agreeing with Capitals management that it was time for a change behind the bench. He actually told General Manager George McPhee, “You’re doing what you have to do.” A company man in this sport if there ever was one. He’d just been terminated from his dream job, and still his thoughts were with what was best for the team.

On November 17 the Caps were in Winnipeg, and after they’d fallen behind 4-1 after 40 minutes, most listlessly, I sensed, really for the very first time, that we were watching the onset of destruction. The very next morning I took to Twitter and made explicit my concern: “The biggest indictment of this team was the final frame. Teams with pride and character make it 4-2 or 4-3, to build on for the next outing.”

I reference this moment because when Tarik yesterday morning asked Boudreau when he sensed that things might be slipping from his control the coach pointed to November 17 in Winnipeg.

Way back in January I published a highly unflattering, highly critical two-part read on the struggling, soft and identity-challenged Caps, calling them out for operating in a what I regarded as a “country club” atmosphere of luxury, comfort and precious little accountability that, from where I blogged, undermined an ethos of night-in, night-out hunger and drive — most particularly relative to the lunch pale Capitals rosters of 15-plus years ago. You know, the types of teams Dale Hunter played on here. And last season I also pulled no punches with respect to commenting on the increasing frequency with which Washington hockey fans were taking to social media to share photos and accounts of nightclub encounters with members of the team at troubling hours, and with troubling frequency. And so it was most interesting for me to take in the NHL Network’s coverage of Monday’s drama, Monday night, and hear Billy Jaffe suggest that under Dale Hunter there could be no serious commitment to winning when it mattered without the Caps mending their “clubbing” ways, while Joe Beninati not long later alluded to a “country club atmosphere” taking hold in recent years. The Washington Post’s Tom Boswell authored what I thought was the most severe indictment of the Boudreau era, but taking pains, to his credit, to also assign blame to upper management.

“During the offseason two ex-Capitals went public about the country club atmosphere that undermined discipline on the team. Once you’ve tolerated a star system for years, how can the same coach possibly reverse the trend?”

About a week ago, right as I began sensing that things were truly boiling over, I sent email to some reporters here suggesting that Jason Arnott would be in a unique position to comment on troubles that festered last season and perhaps metastasized this. Arnott had been afforded an inside look at the team last spring and then departed town — having arrived here with great fanfare at the trade deadline as a coveted leadership asset — with nary a word said about it, and having landed quite well in St. Louis this season. To his credit again, Tarik button-holed Arnott out at Kettler on Monday. You might say that in D.C. Arnott saw a loose ship being captained.

“It’s very hard. When you let guys do what they please, what they want [emphasis OFB's], then you come in and get hard on them, it’s pretty tough.”

But by no means should Bruce Boudreau alone be scapegoated for the country club atmosphere — and Boswell emphasizes this in his column. Boudreau wasn’t in D.C. when the Caps drafted Ovechkin and subsequently devised elaborate and clever and highly successive marketing campaigns for him his first two seasons. The coddling and deification of the extraordinary talent began from day one. With Alexander Ovechkin the Capitals, for the first time in their history, had an opportunity to create their Elvis (thin and fat), and they did.

There were no larger-than-life figures on that ’98 Capitals club, captained by the legend, that made it to the Stanley Cup finals, were there? Just food for thought.

So you know that my concerns with the Caps date back deep into last season and you should know too that I opened this season with a renewal of them — I titled my season preview ‘Questions for a Hockey Club at a Crossroads.’ In it I identified Bruce Boudreau as a figure who had to demonstrate marked improvement at his job: “Much as the Capitals’ core roster has experienced growing pains in its path toward legitimate contention, so too has Head Coach Bruce Boudreau. Put bluntly: he’s underwhelmed a lot of observers with his handling of the Capitals’ recent postseasons, and in fact in the judgment of many been out-coached by less experienced bench bosses of lower-seeded clubs.”

I didn’t write this sentiment for that preview file, but I did suggest to a few of my blogger chums here that it was not at all beyond the realm of possibility that the Caps could can Boudreau at about the 25-game mark. I specifically wondered how McPhee would react if, for instance, the Caps were behind Tampa Bay in the Southeast division then. Like I think everyone else, I had no idea we’d see what we have this season from the Panthers. Anyway, my hypothesis occasioned a torrent of email protest back from my chums: “No way; he’s years left on his deal; Ted’s too cheap.” (They really wrote me that.) The Moral: When a team goes bad any GM who values his job will pull the trigger, no matter (within reason) the financial fallout.

* * * * *

I’m closing this file with a very personal feel-good story. Last night the Buffalo Sabres recalled Joe Finley. In the summer of 2010 Fins kept a diary during Capitals’ Development Camp for OFB. It was a really fun project, and I enjoyed most that Big Joe had a lot of fun with it. Meeting him for that project remains one of the great rewards I’ve derived from this blogging gig. Big Joe is a true gentle giant, truly one of the friendliest people I’ve met in the sport.

During his development time with the Caps Fins suffered injury after injury, and finally, at the end of last season, the team did what most teams do after a first-round pick fails to show some durable glimmer that all of that development investment was paying off: they cut ties with him.

Buffalo invited Fins to training camp this fall, and he showed well enough to earn an AHL contract with the Sabres’ American League affiliate in Rochester. With the Amerks Fins has been what the Buffalo News this week termed “a revelation.” Through 18 games this season Big Joe has seriously thrown his weight around (57 PIMs), and played so strongly that he’s earned a shut-down designation with the top pairing on the Rochester blueline. His +10 is best on the team. It’s a terrific story, capped by his earning this week a three-year, two-way contract with the Sabres and last night’s callup. I sent him a congratulatory note the other day, in which I somewhat jokingly expressed remorse that the Caps hadn’t held on to him one year longer, given the arrival of the new sheriff in town. He agreed.

Turns out, as a sports town we’re somewhere in the middle — not real good, certainly not awful. Steinberg offers a bit of a comparative continuum which posits cities such as Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Buffalo as distinctly passionate about their teams — the very civic identity of those towns is directly related to the teams, Steinberg suggests — versus a set of sports apathetic outposts found in Atlanta, Tampa, and Miami. We’re somewhere in between on that continuum. Sounds about right to me.

Of course, I’ve been one who’s long suggested that big media in these parts have played a lead role in limiting — undermining, actually — the perception of Washington as a sport town. Tourists and business visitors to our city are fairly forced into the perception that D.C. only cares about one team each morning they pick up the big paper or tune in to the local television sportscasts. To some extent — especially with respect to NHL hockey — this self-fulfilling myopia bred a countering, insurgent new media alternative.

If there’s a shortcoming to Steinz’s piece I’d point to its deference to a longstanding (cliched, really) scapegoat for our perceived inadequacy: that the cultural foundation of D.C. is the federal bureaucracy, bringing with it, among other traits, unavoidable transiency. For one thing, D.C. has become a high-tech haven over the past 20 years, delivering high-income, durable, roots-planting occupations, which in turn has helped drive dramatic development across the region. Concurrently, there has been exponential growth in federal contracting, and contracting careers, and the only thing that outlives death is a federal contract. But I’m not sure it matters any more whether you’re in D.C. four years with an administration or 40 with a lobby shop. The ubiquity of digital media, the voracious information consumption via hand-helds — and Washington is as wired as any city in the world — renders occupational consideration in this discussion, I think, moot. And doesn’t it say something that we now have two around-the-clock sportstalk radio stations operating here?

I think there are very specific features unique to D.C. that damn us as a sports town, separate and distinct from a one-trick-pony media. Up at the very top — and Steinberg certainly captures this, if in somewhat muted tones — is the conspicuous absence of winning. And not just winning, but winning as a well-managed sports entity. The Pittsburgh Steelers don’t win the Super Bowl every year, but isn’t it commonly accepted that they’re an especially well-run outfit, competitive every year? And further, that the Redskins are not much run like the Steelers are? Interestingly, Steinz amplified this sentiment in Tuesday’s Post, in responding to readers on line. “[A]t some point, I think ownership needs to accept some responsibility for repeated failings over years and years,” he wrote. “And I mean more about the Abe Pollin-led Wizards than the Daniel Snyder-led Redskins, although both would qualify.”

Snyder. To me — and I speak as one who in his Washington youth slept in Redskins pajamas, and toted a Redskins lunchpail to school — Snyder is a plague. We are rightly mocked by the fans of other NFL teams for giving him safe harbor here. I wish I had a dime for every instance I heard a Washington sports fan email me or address me at the rink with ‘If only Ted [Leonsis] owned the Redskins.’  There are two constants to Snyder’s reign of error-terror: His team will lose, and somewhere along the way he’ll freshly speak or act in a manner that gravely offends the sensibilities of our civilized community. Like suing a financially strapped grandmother or creative, civic-minded journalists.

The hope — the expectation — is that now that the pro basketball team is owned by Leonsis better days are ahead. (Of course, they actually have to play for that to happen.) But Ted inherited a spectacularly dysfunctional, decades-long-in-decay entity with the Wiz. That was Abe Pollin’s doing, and Steinz is right to remind Washingtonians of it.

Washington, too, has a physical infrastructure problem with its sports teams, in my opinion. Verizon Center is fine (spectacularly located, turns out). But FedEx Field might be the most reviled big stadium in the entire country. It is a monument mostly to the ineptness of D.C. government, in forcing the Redskins to flee the District to find a much-needed new home. It takes forever to get out to, forever to return from, and while you’re there you’re fairly pilfered out of your retirement savings in attempting to feed your family or wet your whistle.

I’ll raise some eyebrows and provoke some rebuke with my thoughts on Nationals Park, but I maintain that the Nats, in going cheap and with a cookie cutter design, have cultivated, durably, below average attendance on nights when the ace isn’t pitching. It’s not so much that Nationals Park is bad — it isn’t; it’s that to me it suffers comparatively by virtue of its proximity to one of the finest baseball stadiums in all the world, Camden Yards. Put it this way: If I’ve a chum in from out of town who’s a real seamhead, and both the Nats and O’s are home and I’m seeking to deliver to my buddy the more memorable stadium experience, I’m taking him up to Charm City. Note that Camden Yards opened in 1992 and took all of one year to secure Major League Baseball’s All Star game. I’m sure the Nats will get that game one day; it’s just that there’s little clamor from seamheads around the country to fly in and take in a game in our new baseball stadium. For good reason. Again, it’s not a dump. It just suffers as alternative to a classic design up the Beltway. I’m really surprised the Nats didn’t give that greater consideration on the drawing board.

Anyway, we have a bunch of pro teams, but only two of them compete in a stylish home. And we really only have one owner in town who stands as exemplary with respect to earning fans respect and placing proper management in place. In sports, as with so many other things in life, you reap what you sew.

Take note that you can visit the Post here and leave comment related to how D.C. could become a better hockey town. I think a little more springtime winning would take care of that just fine.

The latter portion of the summer of 2011 has delivered credible and troubling assessments about the Washington Capitals in a macro sense, bringing to surface a facet seldom analyzed in failure’s shadows. Two recently departed Capitals addressed these concerns — ones of organizational culture.

With the passage of Labor Day weekend I was closing in on an authentic missing of hockey, my frozen spirits close to being rejuvenated. This was the toughest summer for me to date in quelling concerns I’d long suspected and developed about the core of this hockey team, and Tuesday morning brought about a renewal of them. I hopped aboard my Metro train this morning with a copy of today’s Washington Examiner. The newspaper informed me of the manner in which no small number of Washington Capitals inaugurated the holiday weekend here:

On one level, it’s patently unfair for me to react to the story as I instantly did (“Great, the barflies are back at it.”). Problem is, there’s a context for consuming this account, and it’s unflattering: these Capitals Young Guns are no strangers to hard partying — it’s been richly illustrated in social media snapshots by hockey fans patronizing the watering holes at the same time as the players. A few bartenders read this blog, too. If Lord Stanley had christened a chalice for the hockey team that annually celebrates the best, these Washington Capitals would be dynastic in winning it.

At issue here isn’t some tee-totaling sensibility relative to millionaire professional athletes. My own opinion is that when it comes to puck sodas and pucks, beers aren’t the exclusive prerogative of beer-leaguers; I’m well versed in the role that spirits have played in locker rooms and player gatherings across generations in our sport. The Boston Bruins went on a big-time bender early this offseason — but after they’d won the Stanley Cup.

Additionally, there seems something manifestly healthy about a hockey team regularly hanging out socially with one another. And heck, given the chance, many of us probably would love to buy our hockey heroes a beer if we saw them out and about in Georgetown or Arlington. (Though for a few of them, Michelob Ultras.) But I probably speak for at least a few fans in suggesting that we’d really like to buy them a round after they actually won something.

With respect to this past Friday night’s party outing as alluded to in the Examiner, I’ll stipulate that everything was carried off in moderation (the roll call of the depleted bar shelf notwithstanding), that no player left the nightclub unsafely impaired. Still, because this is the Washington Capitals, winners of nothing, ever, and because this band of Young Guns really does know how to put playoff disappointments behind them real fast, and get about the business of partying, I have an issue with merely the optics of this moment. Show up for training camp fat, as some millionaires in red did a year ago, and yes, going top shelf to the tune of four figures (or more) is fair game for criticism, at this moment, with this underachieving bunch. Put another way: This is probably not quite the offseason activity proscribed by Gary Roberts. (A champion)

(Why don’t we ever hear of a single Capitals player training with Roberts, as Tampa’s Steven Stamkos does, in the offseason?)

When our Elisabeth Meinecke chatted up Brooks Laich this summer about his offseason training regimen, she didn’t get the sense that he was devoting many evenings to the top, middle and bottom shelves of booze at bars. And it was with that account also in mind that I got ticked off by this morning’s story. I’m tired of reading about the underachieving Washington Capitals in our newspapers’ society pages, building up barfly tabs. Instead, as with Lis’ piece on Brooks, I want to read about barbells being lifted, not shotglasses. A legion of losing — and most especially looking seriously out of shape while being vanquished — will breed such cynicism. Beginning immediately, I want to hear no more discussion from national television announcers about problems with Nick Backstrom’s skating. There’s nothing wrong with his skating — he looked quite mobile while amassing 101 points in 2009-10. But he also looked quite fit then.

To address in greater detail another important context for this story: In addition to more than a few local hockey fans taking to Twitter with photos and accounts of encountering Capitals’ players out partying hard about town at conspicuous times — like the night before a matinee game — this summer we also learned of some insiders’ perspectives about the culture of the Washington Capitals. A couple of the team’s top-line performers last season were, relative to preceding seasons, conspicuously out of shape — claims supported by departed Capitals Matt Bradley and Dave Steckel. (At a media availability today Alexander Ovechkin told reporters that the team had already been instructed not to discuss the Bradley comments.) There was discussion of players missing practices (more than a few) with “dubious” injuries. Talk to any old school reporters who’ve covered this game a while and that’s often code for hung over.

I was one who in the middle of last season identified what I regarded as a troubling culture that had formed around this hockey team: they weren’t shy about being seen out celebrating life lavishly; they talked a good game about winning when it mattered — most particularly with training camp t-shirt slogans; and when more springtime shortcomings followed always there seemed, from management in particular, a fixation on injuries as excuse. I also thought way too much attention was paid to the Alexander Semin component of Bradley’s remarks and way too little to his indictment of team culture. The Capitals may or may not thrive with Semin a member of the club; they most assuredly will not if what Bradley intimated about preferential treatment, Ovi’s conditioning, and dubious practice absences is true and allowed to continue. This team badly needs a change in culture still, I maintain, and that begins with optics.

I think we could all agree: there’s a real difference between blowing off steam with your office mates with a few cold ones after work and ordering not merely top-shelf liquor on an outing on the town but all of the booze on the shelves below as well. No one who has closely followed the Capitals in recent years could profess to be surprised by the Examiner’s account today. That in and of itself is troubling.

If I were the head coach of the Caps, I’d have introduced the team to Blue Moon — warm — on the plane ride back from Tampa this spring. They probably would have hit the wagon the entire offseason.

Meanwhile, should this prognosticating actually come true, take a look — if you dare — at how our friend Peerless says he’ll acknowledge the feat.

“Leone wrote nearly 190 stories for publication during the 2010-11 season, including long-form enterprise stories about every six weeks on topics such as offseason training, retired Bears who have settled in the Hershey area, and Patrick McNeill’s recovery from shoulder surgery.  In addition to these stories in print, Leone also posted over 100 additional separate blog entries on pennlive.com such as breaking news and practice updates.

“At the beginning of the season, Tim was the sole author of a 16-page season preview special section. Through his online work with Pennlive.com, he hosted a weekly Bears Talk video, and was a regular first intermission guest on the Bears Radio network.

“In a year that saw the successful return of the AHL All-Star Classic to central Pennsylvania, Leone provided in-depth coverage for the event.  He also now has more than 1,400 followers on Twitter, among the most followed AHL journalists.  He has also authored two books in past seasons with strong AHL themes, “The Hershey Bears: Sweet Seasons” (2003) and “Gabby: Confessions of a Hockey Lifer” (2009).

“Leone becomes the first Patriot-News sportswriter to be honored with the Ellery since Steve Summers and Bruce Whitman were both honored by the AHL after the 1976-77 season. Other Hershey winners of the Ellery Award include Gregg Mace (Television, 2006), John Walton (Radio, 2004), Dave Sottile (2000, Newspaper), Dan Sernoffsky (1994, Newspaper), Russ Small (Radio, 1981) and Tim Melton (Television, 1978).

For its part, the AHL today said of Leone, “On the AHL beat in Hershey since 1995, Tim Leone continues to provide outstanding coverage for the Bears and the American Hockey League in the Harrisburg Patriot-News print edition while expanding his reach to on-line media. Leone wrote more than 180 stories for publication during the 2010-11 season, posted an additional 100-plus entries to his blog at PennLive.com, and provided his more than 1,500 Twitter followers with frequent breaking-news updates.”

And if the excellence of Leone’s work weren’t enough, he has also been uniquely accessible to, and supportive of, new media efforts to chronicle hockey in both Hershey and Washington. You don’t have to search long or hard to see his contributions across a wide range of Capitals’ and Bears’ digital content. This blog especially has benefited from Leone’s support.

Congratulations to one of hockey’s most dedicated and talented scribes.

It's been quite a roller coaster ride for Bruce Boudreau in Washington

The Capitals may or may not have a deficit of leadership on the ice and in the room with this roster, but dogging them most in the initial hours and days of yet another postseason far too early arrived at is an intense debate about their ultimate leader — Bruce Boudreau.

There is anything but consensus on this matter; in fact, it’d be difficult to identify a moment in Capitals’ history when as much high-pitched debate centering on the fate of the coach commanded as much speculation in print space, such a frenzy of pixels on line, and so much oration on the airwaves.

For his critics, Bruce Boudreau is a tale of two seasons — the terrific winning percentage of the regular season campaign juxtaposed by conspicuous struggle in the postseason. Moreover, he’s been bested in the postseason, while guiding favored clubs, by a host of wet-behind-the-ears coaches — John Stevens, Dan Bylsma, and most recently Guy Boucher. General Manager George McPhee on Thursday’s break-up day at Kettler seemed to offer both endorsement of the coach while also acknowledging that no firm decision on his future had been made.

“There’s no difference between a playoff coach and regular season coach. Either you’re a good coach or you’re not. He’s a good coach,” McPhee claimed. To which Yahoo’s Greg Wyshynski replied, “has anyone yet heard from the Capitals why, then, there’s such a difference between their regular-season and postseason success?”

Puck Daddy adds:

“In eliminations against the Pittsburgh Penguins (2009), the Montreal Canadiens (2010) and the Tampa Bay Lightning (2011), Boudreau was outcoached. Bad line changes and too many men on the ice penalties — on a power play, no less — undermined the team against Tampa. He’s been unable to extract the same level of intensity from his players in the postseason as he has the regular season.”

Boudreau’s return for next season, Wyshynski wrote mere minutes after the Capitals’ expulsion from the postseason, “is rightfully in question.” For one of hockey’s most influential voices, Boudreau’s fate in D.C. this spring ought to be dire: “This should be Boudreau’s final game as head coach, because standards need to be higher than this.”

By Friday Jon Press of Japers’ Rink had seen enough of Gabby as well:

“either Bruce Boudreau had the wrong message, or he had the right one and was incapable of getting his players to execute it. Whichever it was, it’s ultimately a poor reflection upon the coach — being an effective communicator and motivator is every bit as important as being an effective tactician and strategist here . . . for whatever reason, he’s never been able to consistently extract from this Caps team a whole which is greater than the sum of its parts when it’s mattered most. It’s time to find someone who can.”

In today’s Boston Globe Kevin Paul Dupont, taking up Washington’s latest springtime collapse and its implications, offers a commendable but brutally frank assessment of how short of success the Capitals have achieved while under Boudreau’s guidance: “Until a team makes it to the conference finals (a.k.a. the Stanley Cup semifinals), its playoff aspirations never really mature beyond “Off Broadway”’ status. Clearly, that cold reality was running through the fingertips of Capitals owner Ted Leonsis when he decided to tickle his computer keyboard immediately after his club’s wipeout Wednesday night at the hands of the Lightning.”

Dupont reminds that Bruins’ GM Peter Chiarelli publicly backed coach Dave Lewis early one offseason only to jettison him 60 days later. And Lewis didn’t get four cracks at postseason play with an elite roster as Boudreau has:

“Something has to change in Washington. It’s just not working when it needs to work the most. Blogger/owner/truthsayer Leonsis has all but written it on the subway walls and tenement halls. And it could be that McPhee will have to send his coach packing, or join him on the subway. For the Cup semis, all they’re hearing each year at the Verizon Center are the sounds of silence. “

Up in Hershey, Bears’ beat reporter Tim Leone, who knows Boudreau perhaps as well as anyone in hockey, defended the coach, stressing the vicissitudes of bounces and inches in the NHL  postseason:

“If Washington wins in overtime in Game 3 for a 3-0 series lead against eventual champion Pittsburgh two years ago, the Caps might already have a Cup in the bank. If Philly’s Jeff Carter gets the puck two inches higher in OT of Game 2 in the first round against Pittsburgh that same year, maybe the Flyers would have won it.

“A coaching change is a reaction way out of proportion to the small margins deciding winning and losing. A dramatic move might immediately feel like it gets you closer to a championship, but in reality it pushes you farther away.”

There are “Ifs” and “buts” that may be used to explain away every misfortune of a close call in a hockey postseason, and in every sport’s postseason for that matter. Ultimately what we have to evaluate are the final results, coldly and dispassionately. The Tampa Bay Lightning didn’t sweep the Capitals out of the playoffs by inches. Their star performers outperformed the Capitals’ stars by leaps and bounds. Michal Neuvirth was good, but Dwayne Roloson was appreciably better. And a real telling discrepancy in this series came from Tampa’s plumbers and muckers — Sean Bergenheim foremost among them — who lept over the boards for every shift and played inspired hockey. The men who wore the Lightning sweater were inspired by their coach. It’s difficult to look at any Capitals’ performance this spring save game 5 against New York and suggest we witnessed inspired hockey players in red and white. And the same could be said of Boudreau’s club when it counted last spring.

Boudreau’s defenders this spring fail to acknowledge that the coach entered this season with a bit of a mandate for the postseason — at least among fans and media. That’s what last spring’s shocking round one dismissal earned, coupled with going one for four in home-ice Game 7s. No one around Washington suggested that if the Caps could merely dust off an 8 seed in round one this spring all would be swell. The Capitals, most believed, needed to make discernible progress. They did not.

It isn’t just that there is a heavy accumulation of poor postseason results — shockingly early, uniformly, and always against lower-seeded teams — that is conspiring strongly against Gabby’s continuation here. It’s how they’ve looked in most of the defeats: tentative and indecisive, frightened at times, even, sloppy, and conspicuously lacking in emotion and drive.

Interestingly, there is probably a good deal of shared sentiment about Boudreau among the firing versus retaining camps this spring. Both sides would probably agree that on the whole, and relative to a majority of his NHL peers, Gabby’s a good coach, of inordinate achievement. Both sides would likely agree, too, that he’s well managed and developed George McPhee’s impressive stable of exceptional young talent. The divergence, I think, arrives at a point not unlike most of us arrived at with Glen Hanlon in the autumn of 2007: another level of accomplishment is needed and appropriate, and there is precious little evidence in this coach’s body of work in Washington that he’s likely to achieve it. Instead, his backers rely on faith.

The past week’s best assessment of the state of the Caps came from our city’s most accomplished and gifted sportswriter, the Post’s Thomas Boswell. Boz was out at break-up day at Kettler on Thursday, and he came away with a clear sense of a deeply troubled Capitals culture.

“At times like this, when a no.1 seed gets swept by a No.5 seed, you line up the firing squad or you line up the excuses. For the second straight year, the Caps went with the excuses . . .

“In a sense, the Caps are trapped by their own culture of decency, self-regard and optimism. They want to give everybody a second, and sometimes a fourth chance, even the coach. They don’t want to act in haste and repent at leisure, even if it means soft players aren’t traded and get to repeat their spring failures. They don’t want to blow up what they’ve built because they believe in sound foundations. But the Caps also flatter themselves that what they have created is a notch better than it actually is. And the Caps hate, hate, hate to admit any evaluation is wrong, until it’s so obvious they can’t deny it.

“Good intentions, good results, then playoff mortification, year after year, followed by the same mantra: There’s nothing wrong. We were just unlucky or injured. Next year: our turn. Keep the sellouts coming.”

Mortification indeed.

More beautiful Boz: “What team reacts to such devastating defeats with equanimity, common sense and a huge sigh of acceptance at life’s unfairness? How estimable. But it drives you nuts.”

On an individual game basis, the scoreboard will suggest that this Caps-Bolts series was close and competitive. In reality, the Capitals were never in this series beyond the knotted up nature of late in game 1. Once Tampa Bay secured victory in overtime then, while spectacularly fatigued, and while the Capitals were not, the lasting psychological damage was inflicted.

Again.

Once again, Bruce Boudreau was no match for his NHL bench counterpart in spring. Many adjustments needed, none made. Guy Boucher was uniformly impressive in this series in every respect save one — his aptitude with metaphors. He called this a David versus Goliath matchup, but he had no notion who the actual David was. But he’s a young man and a rookie coach perhaps without access to the grainy footage of Capitals’ playoff history, and its uniformly grim outcomes.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this fantastic flameout in yet another spring was that the very premiere players who in all piety expressed resolve for righting the wrongs of previous springs again, with the exception of the captain, came up conspicuously small. The story of the Tampa Bay upset — upset sweep — was the character and determination and drive of the Lightning’s Top Three, fairly embarrassing their Washington star counterparts. As such, there must be not only a regime change in D.C. but a cultural reconstruction.

About a half dozen roster spots ought to be safe for 2011-12 — those of Ovechkin, Neuvirth, Carlson, Johansson, Alzner, Wideman.

The rest need to be rigorously re-evaluated. The rest are wholly marketable (to the extent that there are parties interested in discussing them).

But re-evaluated by whom?

Earlier this season I wrote about a country club culture enveloping this franchise — an aura of pampering and entitlement, of rampant, conspicuous Playboy-ism, and of premature, illusory achievement settling in. The owner didn’t much care for that characterization. When the winning once again became habitual in March, he reminded me of the file. I don’t expect to hear further challenge from him about this assessment this offseason.

Some seven years ago Capitals management embarked upon a rigorous roster rebuild. Beginning immediately, team management — which may be reconstructed itself — needs to reconstruct the entire culture of this franchise.

For it is a franchise of abject failure. Quick — when was the most recent instance you gathered your buddies to toast to the last four Southeast division championships?

Today this franchise is unworthy of its fanbase, which is one of the best in the league. The reconstruction must address this.

For going on 40 years, the Capitals have yet to achieve a durable, intimidating postseason identity. That identity, I submit, must cease being elusive, and achieving it must specifically guide the reconstruction I believe imperative in this moment. The surest way to forge such an identity is to select a coach the likes of which we’ve never before seen in D.C. A coach who will not accept 30- and 40-minute nightly efforts. A coach who will not turn a blind eye to his twentysomething charges making the last-call rounds in Georgetown in-season. A coach who knows no notion of “optional skates” in autumn, but rather, perhaps, in July. A coach with the gravitas and guts to stare straight into Ovi’s eyes in a month’s time and say, ‘Young man, return home if you must this summer, but for every photo of you I see on line in a Moscow discotheque this summer, we’ll skate in miles come September as a group.”

Call it a new creed if you will: Less clubbing, more running.

Or perhaps you thought the Capitals looked rather spry in the third periods this postseason — particularly against Tampa. These were the least impressively conditioned Capitals for third periods of a postseason I’d seen in my lifetime. They looked better conditioned in the compressed schedule of last season, with its Olympics participation. Imagine. A storyline suddenly emerged that Tampa Bay was exploiting the Capitals’ lack of speed. When did the Caps suddenly become a slow hockey team? The answer is, they didn’t.

They just looked that way.

By all accounts Bruce Boudreau was the proverbial “players’ coach.”

How has that worked out with this bunch?

The Toronto Globe & Mail’s Eric Duhatschek has long been one of my favorite writers in all of hockey. For decades his prose has delivered erudition, nuance, and general elite thoughtfulness. But yesterday Duhatschek penned what I regard as his least impressive column, ever: ‘Boudreau shouldn’t take the fall in Washington.’ He labeled talk in support of Gabby’s firing “absurd” and “patently unfair.”

“Boudreau’s record as the Capitals coach is extraordinary,” Duhatschek wrote. And he’s right, Gabby was great at winning here — October through March. During regular season play, Gabby’s gone 189-79-39. But there’s a dramatic counterpart to that regular season success, in the postseason. There Gabby’s won two of the six series he’s coached in, 17-20 overall, and you’d be hard-pressed to identify a single series in which the Caps were regarded as underdog. That’s not an inconsiderable body of underachieving work.

Duhatschek continues:

“What we have is a coach who develops kids, game plans well, and has his team alive in the second round of the playoffs when 22 other clubs have already gone home. People talk about the Capitals needing to take the next step – and they do and they will eventually. But it is not as if their window of opportunity is closing any time soon either, not with three young goalies in the system, four young defencemen in the lineup now and a superstar just approaching his prime years who is still one of the most fun players to watch in the game.”

“Game plans well”??? As with his contention of Gabby’s winning excellence, Duhatschek offers no contextual support for this claim. Indeed, in game 2 against Tampa, Gabby lamented how a “river hockey” approach overtook his club. In the absence of coherent and sustained game plans we saw the Capitals often pursue a highly individualized style of play, with the captain especially susceptible to it. By the bitter end, we saw a band of misled brothers wholly uncertain of what to do against Tampa Bay, how to counteract “character” game-breakers who rose to the occasion. By the bitter end, you didn’t sense that when all the chips were on the table, there was great resolve and great buy-in by these Caps for what their coach was preaching. They bore all the emotion and passion of exhibition play in September. Especially in this series’ third periods.

Duhatschek here bears an outsider’s sneering elitism in his column. I doubt he’s paid much for hockey tickets the past 25 years, but in Washington they are very expensive. And going up in cost for next season, apparently. Let Duhatschek try and lecture the federal government bureaucrat here straining to pay for his family’s admission at Verizon Center the past four springs, and see if that fella agrees that we’re still just going through requisite “growing pains” with our allegedly contending core of hockey stars.

Chicago and Pittsburgh in recent years seemed to perform at appreciably higher levels with their talented youngsters in spring.

The next coach of the Washington Capitals likely won’t attempt to make ploughhorses out of his roster’s thoroughbreds. “Free Ovi” ought to be the summer battlecry. But most especially, the men who wear the Washington crest beginning next season need to be led by a figure of unassailable street cred — preferably a warrior from the past who wore the crest himself.

The Post’s Metro section on Thursday also brought more fun for the region’s hockey fans — word of one local family’s longstanding allegiance to the Burgundy and Gold shifting dramatically to the Red of Chinatown.

Columnist Robert McCartney’s account of the Bethesda, Md., Krogh family is must-read material for Capitals’ supporters, especially the local and long suffering who’ve endured decades of Redskin overkill here.

The Kroghs, McCartney reports, have had Redskins’ season tickets for more than 40 years, but starting next season they’re abandoning the Danny and embracing Ted’s troops. Especially telling about the respective reversal of fortunes for the two teams, according to the Krogh family: if they have extra Capitals tickets they have no problem recruiting takers for them, but they can’t give away their Skins’ seats. “While I can’t seem to get clients to go with me to a Redskins game, I can get them to go to a Caps game, no problem,” a Krogh told McCartney.

Then the family cites a litany of good reasons for the increasingly widespread Deadskins’ dissatisfaction — the need to devote the entirety of Sundays getting to, enduring, and returning from the games, feeling ripped off at every concession inside the stadium, and being surrounded by “falling down drunks” each Sunday. Well who wouldn’t want to endure such conditions, and at the cost of a moderate mortgage?

McCartney wonders how many other longtime Skins’ ticket holders have made such a dramatic switch of allegiance. It’s an intriguing question.

“By traditional standards, for a longtime Washington area family like the Kroghs, this is heresy. Sacrilege. An abomination,” McCartney writes.

It’s also a sign of the times.

Did you know that Gordie Howe spent the most personally fulfilling years of his career in Houston? That’s according to the book, “The Lone Star Skate.”  Everyone knows that Texas is the land of football, but hockey has actually had a presence there for many years.

There were many great anecdotes throughout the book. One of my favorites was an interview with former coach Rick Kozuback about the first pro hockey game in Belton, TX:

 We packed the Bell County Expo Center with 6,200 people, and I don’t know if any of them had ever seen a hockey game…it was a great game, and then the second period ended. All these people get up and head into the concourse area. “At first, we thought they were just going to the concessions,” Kozuback continues. “Then we realized a lot of them were going outside. We thought, Wow, there must be a lot of smokers here in Central Texas. Then we start seeing the car lights go on. People were leaving. We ran out of the building telling people to come back, there was another period. Some of them came back, but we probably lost 1,500 to 2,000 people. It was crazy.”

Another tale was about the Dallas Stars’ early days. In order to get people in the door, one of their marketing strategies was to hand out free tickets to sorority girls and topless dancers. Once male attendees saw the quality and quantity of beautiful women in the arena, it became the place to be.

The book was a good read- lots of interesting information and photos. The only thing I didn’t like about the book was the lack of captions for some of the photos. Still, that’s a minor quibble, especially compared to the quality of the book.

For more information, visit The Lone Star Skate.