I was struck at the ferocity and domination with which Detroit skated in periods two and three last night in San Jose. Especially in the third, Detroit simply imposed its will against a terrific Sharks club, and did everything but tie up the game. San Jose triumphed principally because Joe Thornton, heretofore a postseason no-show in big games, skated the game of his life when his team needed it most.

Like every club in the NHL’s postseason, the Wings are battered brutally, and last night they lost Todd Bertuzzi and Dan Cleary to the medical ward as well. But it just didn’t seem to matter. To the Wings, injuries are an obstacle but never an excuse.

Detroit is an “old” hockey team, too, but did you see how energized and fleet of foot they looked when their season was on the line last night? And when you compare that with how our Capitals looked in every third period of the second round, what conclusion do you draw?

This week the Washington Post’s Dan Steinberg reminded us that the offseasons of sports are what we in sporting Washington do best. And so the headline-grabbing news relates to hockey coaches and GMs staying put, and the hoops team getting a nifty new look but not a badly needed name change. Again: it’s middle spring, and nothing of consequence is transpiring for D.C. sports. We are a horrible, horrible sports town, still, not because our residents lack passion or commitment as with those in great sports towns, but because of the rank incompetencies of the men who are the stewards of our teams.

The early hours of every hockey offseason in Washington are grotesque because they are always arrived at prematurely. But I am finding this offseason uniquely vexing, for it is forcing upon me a confrontation with a new and unpleasant consideration of our owner and his management team. Our owner, the executives surrounding him, his coach, they are all fine men, and quite competent at their jobs. They are better than average, I think. And because they are merely better than average they loom as exemplars among their local peers. But what concerns me this spring is that we’ve no evidence that Capitals management possesses what might be termed a Special Forces mindset for securing a coveted target.

And in the world we live in, I think, truly coveted targets require Special Ops.

The Detroit Red Wings strike me as a Special Forces operation within our sport. Notable obstacles are ever placed in their way — amid all the heightened talk of franchise relocation this season, we’re reminded that the Wings would very much like to move to the Eastern conference, to address their longstanding travel ardor. They are, annually, a road weary hockey club. It just never seems to matter. And given their now decades-long reign of success, they ever draft late in each round of each entry draft, after all the bluechip talent seemingly has been selected. It just never seems to matter. They lose a Scotty Bowman and replace him, after a brief dalliance with Dave Lewis, with a Mike Babcock. They just go Special Ops on the opposition as the occasion mandates. The San Jose Sharks defeated a special adversary last night.

What about our Washington Capitals would you identify as Special Ops rival to the Wings? Its Marketing? Its web ops? Anything?

A few years back, there was frenzy over allegations that the New England Patriots, another outfit deadly serious about winning, was engaging in illicit, outside-the-sanctioned mode of football operations: that they were cheating. I haven’t much interest in the NFL, but for some reason this week I thought back to that moment and that team. I don’t know that much came about those allegations against the Patriots, but today I find it interesting that it was the Patriots — and not say the Redskins — who were forced to defend themselves against such attack. I guess today still a lot of football fans outside of New England believe that something sinister and covert was executed by Bill Belichick.

The warfare-sports mix of metaphor needs to be executed, if at all, with limit and care. But this spring in Washington, with the stunning news of the remarkable mission of SEAL Team Six, I can’t help but wrestle a bit with the notion that when it comes to hockey in my hometown, we are badly in need of the equivalent of a SEAL Team Six running things, when at present, relative to a club like the Wings, we have McHale’s Navy.

I’m hardly alone in such thinking. Again I reference the recent post mortem of the Post’s Tom Boswell:

“[George] McPhee respects his players’ pain. His face darkens as he describes Mike Knuble playing with a shattered thumb that required four pins and pain-killing shots just so he could take the ice. He knows which man can’t open his own car door after a game, which may never play again and which could hardly get off the ice unaided after one game.

“Attuned to such sacrifice and 100-hour coaching weeks, McPhee transmits that appreciation to Leonsis, a man defined by loyalties. If you bleed for them, they find it mighty hard to slit your throat [emphasis OFB's]. And that’s wrong?

“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.”

As it relates to the real serious news of this spring, of covert warfare and military unilateralism, I am intrigued by what’s followed the initial awe and celebration of our nation’s feat over its greatest foe. Just in the past few days, a segment of our culture, clearly flanked left on the political spectrum, is articulating something akin to buyer’s remorse: Did we really have to go hitman? For these thinkers, there seems something elementally and intrinsically indecent about such a world.

And they’re right. And it’s this harrowing indecency which requires Special Ops.

On a far less important scale triumph in pursuit of sports’ greatest prize — securing the coveted target — surely requires something akin to a Special Ops mindset. Tampa Bay under the guidance of Steve Yzerman, a good many in hockey today believe, is closer to executing that mindset than we in Washington with our team. Yzerman of course was bred in Detroit.

By the time the Flyers were finished pushing themselves hard against the 2010-11 salary cap on Thursday they had a top five on the blueline that looked like this: Chris Pronger, Matt Carle, Kimmo Timonen, Braydon Coburn, and Andrej Meszaros. Not a pushover among them. All Pittsburgh added to its blueline was $45 million in committed money to former Devil Paul Martin and former Coyote Zbynek Michalek. A prime puck mover and a shut down stud there. And in New Jersey, where early on Thursday it was already tough getting shots on through to Martin Brodeur, by happy hour it was especially tough: Lou Lamoriello added high-end rearguards Henrik Tallinder from Buffalo and perhaps this free agency class’ crown jewel among blueliners, the Senators’ Anton Volchenkov.

The Caps? Zippy.

“We have seven guys ready to go [on the blueline],” general manager George McPhee told the Washington Post’s Tarik El Bashir immediately in advance of the silly spending season. Problem is, two of them are named Tyler Sloan and John Erskine, and their nominal shutdown guy is a very finesse d-man — one who’s built like a golfer. And two of McPhee’s projected top four rearguards heading into 2010-11 are aged 20 and 21, respectively. John Carlson and Karl Alzner are talented, and they sure seem to pair perfectly together, but in what will certainly be the most critical season under the management of George McPhee, a season in which another very short postseason is likely to cause heads to roll, the Caps on Thursday sent a conspicuously confusing message about their battle readiness for next spring — while enemy nations around them added heavy artillery.

And before we get too puffy with pride about fiscal restraint and enviable cap space, what of the men who made most of those big moves in the East yesterday? How often do Ray Shero and especially Devil Lou royally screw up with important personnel moves? (Also, how many Stanley Cups have they won?)

I was one who believed the contract the Flyers inked with Chris Pronger last summer an ill-advised one, most particularly in term. I still do. But I also know that I just got done watching Chris Pronger play hockey about two weeks ago.

The Montreal Canadiens this spring may well have offered a blueprint for counteracting the perimeter attack of the Washington Capitals — sag and sit back and keep get it clogged in the middle, and opportunistically counter-attack. I watched two American League teams scare the historically strong Hershey Hears club this spring with this same ethos. On Thursday, three lead challengers to the Caps in the East shopped as if they wanted life made miserable in the middle of the ice. Two of those teams — Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — were already strong down the middle at center, where the Caps are not.

One takeaway conclusion from yesterday’s hand-sitting by GMGM is an explicit faith statement on his part in his young bluechip blueliners, who served as the no. 1 pairing for the Calder Cup winning Bears. If there are to be big-league growing pains for them they best arrive in autumn, not spring. We will never know to what extent McPhee kicked tires yesterday, but the bottom line is tough clubs around his — however much you may believe they overpaid on Thursday — got stronger, and where it counts most against these Caps.

Meanwhile, Caps’ fans are left to wonder just what George McPhee must see on the personnel landscape to actually move on a shutdown partner for his hybrid defenseman, Mike Green. In Zbynek, Martin, and Volchenkov he had a pick of premium, far from washed up shutdown talents, and Volchenkov commanded ($4.25 million) a decent bit less than what I imagined he would have. Really, he’s a few hundred thousand dollars more expensive than Tom Poti. He did earn a six-year term from New Jersey, and a no movement clause as well. That latter contract feature may have given McPhee a case of the vapors — he last awarded one to Michael Nylander.

In the short term, there really was no pressure on McPhee to bolster his blueline. It will be better — in the regular season — with the addition of Carlson and Alzner. Moreover, one or two dramatically improved Southeast teams next season might mean that the Caps won’t win the division by 40 points but rather by merely 20. They are assured of a top 3 seed next spring.

'Our defense is robust and impenetrable!'

McPhee gets five months of regular season exhibition play to judge what maturation his Magnificent Seven on the blueline bring to the springtime cauldron that is the NHL playoffs. Meanwhile, he’ll also see up close and personal three dramatically improved bluelines in the Atlantic division. They won’t be fun to play against.

There was a sense as you followed Twitter and TSN Thursday and saw all those big and able bodies pile up on all those enemy bluelines that the acquiring GMs were re-stocking expressly so as to make postseason life against the Capitals enormously uncomfortable. Which made McPhee’s inertia all the more perplexing and disturbing. There’s still a lot of summer left with which potentially to re-fashion a roster plagued by two big holes, but with each week that passes absent any notable alteration the evidence mounts that management may just believe that last season’s 121-point club just didn’t get the breaks. That would be foolish and dangerous thinking, I humbly submit.

It is good and exciting that McPhee has come out early this offseason and expressed conviction in the abilities of more than a few Bears to play pivotal roles for next season’s Capitals — including auditioning Mathieu Perreault in the middle of the second line. Neither Philly nor Pittsburgh is losing sleep over it, however.

What is so disquieting for a fanbase that is perhaps only marginally less despondent in early July than it was in late April is that to date this offseason there has yet to be a move by management that would indicate anything approaching a recognition of the roster’s true achilles heel — it’s back-end and center-ice softness.

George McPhee didn’t spend Thursday golfing, or with his cell phone ringer on silence. But his rivals in the East Thursday competed, and spent, to win. The Capitals on Thursday exercised striking restraint and irrefutable fiscal caution, but for a team fast approaching San Jose Shark stink in spring, they also gambled.

• Carolina Hurricanes vs. Minnesota Wild in Helsinki
• Columbus Blue Jackets vs. San Jose Sharks in Stockholm
• Boston Bruins vs. Phoenix Coyotes in Prague

Obviously, some day, the Capitals will play a game in Russia . . . likely in Moscow. But for now, I’m glad the Caps will start their next season in the U.S.A., ideally in the friendly confines of the Verizon Center.

I’ve included picks made by the Whale with those of the Hurricanes, and of those made by the Nordiques in association with Colorado, to even out the survey period. No need however to add Winnipeg to Phoenix’s draft woes — the Desert Dogs know how to screw the draft pooch up high all on their own. Take a look: