Publicly, McPhee is standing solidly behind his 33-20-10, second-place-in-the-Southeast squad. (The team’s 20 regulation losses before March are 5 more than the team lost in regulation all of last season.) But what are the consequences of another super short stint in the postseason? Isn’t this franchise at a bit of a competitive crossroads?

And if so, is it overstatement to suggest that there are ominous signs abounding? What comfort do you take from the team’s longstanding mediocrity this regular season? After beginning the year 14-4-1, the Capitals since November 19 are at 19-16-9. If it weren’t for the strong start the team would be in a dogfight just to qualify for the postseason.

A year ago at this time McPhee was the toast of the league, engineer of what would go on to be the best-ever Capitals’ club in regular season achievements. But since that President’s trophy winning Capitals’ club was stunned by Montreal in last postseason’s opening round, McPhee’s star has dimmed: He allowed a key roster weakpoint — second-line center — to go unfilled in the offseason, and to be staffed by an audition of mostly unready rookies throughout the season. The absence of consistency and productivity at the position has weakened the Capitals’ attack generally and helped render impotent what was once the league’s best power play.

Most importantly, perhaps, his club appears to be one without an identity: they lunchpale it one night, winning with grit and guile and a commitment to accountability in their own end, then follow soon thereafter with lifelessness — they’ve been shut out an astounding nine times already this season.

A year ago the Caps were no. 1 in the NHL in scoring; this morning they’re outside the top 20 (22nd). A year ago they boasted the league’s best power play; this morning it’s 25th. The PK is better, but it had nowhere to go but up. Stats tell some of this team’s story, but they don’t tell what’s most troubling and vexing: why this team doesn’t show up at all some nights, as with last Friday’s 6-0 molestation by the Blueshirts at Verizon Center. A compelling case could be made for McPhee to tinker or more today solely to try and change the dynamic in the room, seeking to infuse it with some veterans boasting notable postseason pedigrees . . . seeking to infuse it with some hockey heart.

It’s difficult to fathom the Capitals as presently comprised making serious postseason noise without remedy for the center of the ice for the club. The team’s first-unit power play has become relatively easy to defend by virtue of the preponderance of right-shooting skaters on it — the unit has a ton of its shots blocked as opposing PKers sag and slide and congest predictable shooting lanes. Wouldn’t be a bad idea for the GM to try and acquire a depth defenseman capable of bringing it from the point with a left-handed shot.

And there is this to consider, too: Every team surrounding the Caps in the East’s top eight has made at least one notable move toward improvement in the leadup to the trade deadline.

And there is, too, urgency for the GM from the vantage of the opportunity that is there for his team’s taking given the relative parity among the East’s top eight teams. There is no runaway-dynamo of a club in the East this season; Philly is strong but not without its own question marks. The East this spring is very much for the taking for the club of the GM who perhaps does the best work among his peers at re-shaping his roster by 3:00 today.

To try and make sense of Deadline Day madness, I’ll take part in a 2-hour long radio and podcast recap of the day, focusing on the Caps’ — and the league’s — alterations in total, with some of my best buds in pucks: studio host Sky Kerstein of 106.7 the Fan, Ted Starkey of the Washington Times, Brian McNally of the Examiner, and Ed Frankovic of Baltimore WNST. You’ll be able to listen live on 106.7 the Fan’s HD2 channel from 7:00 – 9:00 tonight, and the program will then be podcasted on 106.7′s site a bit later.We’ll delve into where we think this Caps’ team is post 3:00 today, if any moves put them over the top, keys to the Caps contending in the postseason, and how far we think they’ll go. We may even get a Caps’ player or two to join us in the fun.

First, though, here’s a look at what Washington hockeyblogdom is saying about the Caps on this huge day.

• Mike Vogel gets as inside the thinking of the Capitals’ GM as anyone in town. The Caps made a run at Mike Fisher, and all three young goalies are immune from any and all trade talks this year. McPhee is also highly unlikely to part with a no.1 pick in any dealings today.

• Rob Yunich over at Storming the Crease says it’s time for management to take a risk: “This team could be primed for something special — but most likely not as currently constructed. It’s time for GMGM to lay all of his cards out on the table — and show everybody that he’ll do something more than just tweaking the roster.”

• Rock the Red reminds us that McPhee “has a knack for making moves that nobody sees coming.” The good crew there also offers a helpful analysis of the budget limitations likely to restrain McPhee a bit today — unless he gets creative. That blog, though, doesn’t seem to see the urgency of McPhee’s needing to making an impact in the middle of the second line that I do. The Red Rockers remind that the last time the team needed an impact center — in 2008 — McPhee went out and landed one: Sergei Fedorov. The second line hasn’t been stable and consistently productive since Feds left.

Young core players continue to mature into global-elite talents. Additional promising talent, joined by a smattering of savvy free agent and trade acquisitions, fills out a formidable skating roster. There is additionally a surplus of prime talent in net. My friends in the Red Army, I am here this morning to report to you that the state of the Capitals’ Union is Stanley Cup contender-favorite strong!

A lead storyline in this Capitals’ season is the change in the team’s leadership. In December, Chris Clark was dealt to Columbus, his captaincy awarded to Alexander Ovechkin. Since his drafting in 2004, Ovechkin has been the face of hockey in Washington, and it’s a profile that has catapulted hockey’s standing to the fore of Washington’s sports scene. As such, his captaincy was an inevitability, but it also represents an earned leadership, hardly hastily bestowed, and one certain to endure the next decade-plus — a leadership stability the Caps haven’t known since Dale Hunter departed.

A year ago, fellow soldiers, the Capitals enjoyed their finest regular season in team history, earning a team-record 108 points en route to a 50-24-8 record. And yet there was an uneven quality to the team’s performance. They started out white hot on home ice over the first 20 or so home dates then tailed off dramatically. Additionally, the Caps were fairly labeled a team which rose impressively to meet the challenges of the NHL’s elite but ‘played down’ to the levels of inferior competition. This season, the Capitals have been more consistently excellent against all comers.

Some nights they overpower their opponents with their firepower; other nights they triumph in a tactical attack in close-checking affairs; still other nights they win with great goaltending. The constant in the equation is Bruce Boudreau. He is unlikely to win again soon a Jack Adams trophy as the league’s best bench boss, given the volume of skill he coaches, but his team’s stylistic adaptability from night to night speaks volumes for his benchwork.

When 2008-09 ended abruptly, and torturously, in game 7 against Pittsburgh, conventional wisdom posited that the Capitals needed to explore summer free agency relatively aggressively to shore up weak areas exposed by the Penguins. Instead, management ventured modestly but in very well targeted fashion in the shopping season, securing the services of Mike Knuble and Brendan Morrison to replace Sergei Fedorov and Viktor Kozlov. Management left the team’s blueline intact, unaltered — and glutted with NHL-caliber talent.

Sometimes the best moves a GM makes are those he doesn’t.

By resisting the impulse to mortgage the Capitals’ future in a play for Chris Pronger last spring George McPhee today presides over a Cup-contending roster that appears of a contending-caliber far into the future.

Our warriors of winning this season are likely to lead the league in goals scored for the first time in franchise history. Their prolific offense is balanced superbly among three and at times even four lines, but Nicklas Backstrom deserves specific mention for the sniper’s shot he’s added to his world-class playmaking arsenal. The only downside to Backstrom’s season thus far is that he needs a new deal, and it’s going to cost the Caps a ton to get him inked.

Another lead storyline in 2009-10 has been the emergence of an Unheralded Trio: Tomas Fleischmann, Jeff Schultz, and Eric Fehr. If you want to pinpoint a reason why this year’s Capitals’ team looks formidable in the East as the season’s second half marches toward the postseason, the performances of these three players are a consistent catalyst.

When in last season’s preseason Bruce Boudreau spoke of Flash being a 30-goal scorer in the big league, few in media paid him much attention. Today, his are the hands of a 30-goal guy, and he’s now using them to great effect in the middle of the ice, helping forge a lethal follow-on line to Ovechkin-Backstrom-Knuble. Flash is nearly a point-per-game performer (17 goals, 19 assists in 41 games), and he will deservedly represent the Czech Republic in the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. His starring performance is all the more remarkable when you consider that he missed the entirety of training camp, and the season’s opening weeks, with a frightening blood clot.

Jeff Schultz’ preseason was unremarkable. Frankly, he struggled. Frankly, he emerged from the preseason a bit of an afterthought on the Capitals’ blueline, and an early healthy scratch from the lineup. Today, however, he’s rapidly matured into one of Bruce Boudreau’s most reliable rearguards. He will not dazzle you with breakout passes or points, nor manhandle opposing forwards down low. Instead, he smartly assesses an opponent’s attack, reliably takes effective defending angles, and covers vast stretches of his own zone with the breadth of his reach.

But no player overcame more from the end of 2008-09 than Eric Fehr. Early in the postseason he found himself under the knife for surgery on both shoulders. In the early portion of summer he was unable even to feed and dress himself. Early in 2010 he ranks among the most dangerous of third-line wings in the league, and he’s posted career-best numbers (28 points in 41 games) little more than halfway through the season. His production is particularly impressive in light of the modest minutes he nightly skates — rarely more than 11-12 minutes a night, with minimal time on the power play.

As if the Capitals weren’t stacked enough on the NHL roster, their American League affiliate in Hershey is actually outperforming them. Like the Caps, the Bears have flirted with a 20-point cushion over their second-place rival in the division. But the Bears never lose. Here’s their record in their last 21 games: 19-2. With 70 points earned through just 45 games, it’s quite conceivable that Hershey could easily better their best-ever point total of 114 from the 2006-07 season. For good measure the South Carolina Stingrays boast a 16-point lead in the South division of the ECHL. My friends in the Red Army, it is an embarrassment of puck riches we follow with this organization.

It is genuinely difficult to distinguish between the Capitals’ present and future when so much of the talent on the farm seems primed to contribute reliably and productively in the present. Witness the contributions this season of Karl Alzner, Michal Neuvirth, Mathieu Perreault, and John Carlson.

John Carlson, Conqueror of Canada! Gold medal for his bling! Red Army, acknowledge our Hero’s nation-slaying anew!

Carlson was among five players the Bears dispatched to the AHL All Star game earlier this month. A sixth, Braden Holtby, should have participated, but his season has been split between the East Coast and American leagues, and he represented the Stingrays as an All Star. With Hershey this season Holtby is on pace to obliterate team goaltending records. Of his team’s American League affiliation Capitals’ owner Ted Leonsis this month claimed, “The excellence with which that [Hershey] organization is run washes up on us.”

There can be no assurances that the gaudy success across the Washington hockey organization thus far this season will translate into long-lasting postseason success, but should Capitals’ General Manager George McPhee decide he needs to strengthen his roster heading into the postseason, he can. By jettisoning the pricey contracts of Michael Nylander and Chris Clark in the seaon’s first half, he’s created cap space for impact player additions, should he want them. The Capitals have cap space and assets aplenty to be prime players in the wheeling-dealing market of February and early March.

With so much good news enveloping hockey in Washington you’d think there’d be not a thing in the rink to complain about, but there is, and as ever, it’s who’s missing most nights in the rink: much of Washington’s elite media. The usual suspects are conspicuous in their absence. Additionally, a great loss in the middle of this season arrived with the demise of the Washington Times and rising star reporter Corey Masisak.

But there’s some good news on the media front: new and upstart sports talk radio 106.7 the Fan, which from program to program, day after day, recognizes our very winning hockey team wonderfully, and rebukes that other Caps-hating sports talk radio outlet in town (the one owned by you know who). The Fan, as an outlet of its ilk should, delights in the Caps’ MoJo and lavishes generous air team upon the only hot team in town.

Recently the Caps’ press box was filled for a visit from the Detroit Red Wings, for the 23rd home game on the season, and it marked the first visit by most local sports media outlets en masse since the home opener. There are miles to go still with local press to convince them that every home game with this hockey team is a special occasion.

You, however, our city’s fans who’ve sold out Verizon Center all season long, you, the frenzied Red Army, certainly don’t need to be told.

Last May, as Capitals’ players packed up their gear after succumbing to the Penguins in seven games and headed home for the offseason, an awful lot of Caps’ fans rightly wondered what management would do to upgrade a roster that, while 100-pt.-worthy and playoff-perennial, seemed an ingredient or two short of truly elite status. The answer, it turns out, was minimal and modest: wait more on the core.

It became apparent reasonably early in the offseason that the Capitals would not re-up with either Sergei Fedorov or Viktor Kozlov. They were replaced, brilliantly, by Brendan Morrison and Mike Knuble. Otherwise, the Caps’ roster remained more or less intact. Management liked its hand and reasoned that with another season of development and experience its largely organic core would mature more and produce better results. The Capitals last weekend secured 50 points faster than any other Caps’ club in team history, and for about the last month they’ve consistently flirted with no.1 in the league overall status. We don’t yet know if the Capitals are necessarily a club built better for the postseason ahead relative to last year, but clearly thus far management appears vindicated in handling the offseason as it did.

Three young players in particular I think have to be ID’d as maturing into larger and improved and thereby team-improving roles in 2009-10: Eric Fehr, Tomas Fleischman, and Jeff Schultz. All three are the beneficiaries of management’s patience.

Flash, drafted in 2002 by Detroit, was acquired from the Wings for Robert Lang in 2004 as part of the Capitals’ great pre-lockout purge of high-priced vets. Fleischmann quickly developed into a dominant scoring winger in the American League, flourishing most especially while skating for Bruce Boudreau in Hershey in the Bears’ Calder Cup title of 2005-06. The question then became, could Flash take his modest frame and still be productive in the bigger, faster National League.

It’s taken a while, but the answer today appears to be: absolutely. It’s clear that Bruce Boudreau believes it. During training camp in 2008 the head coach could be overheard in the locker room discussing 30-plus goal seasons ahead for the Czech winger. He believed in Flash then and he does now. Flash has a modest 47 goals in 216 NHL games, but 14 of those have come in his 25 games this season — a figure even more impressive when you consider that Flash had absolutely no training camp after being diagnosed with a blood clot in his leg over the summer. And his development into a productive, bona fide top-six forward hasn’t occurred at the expense of his defense: while he skated as a minus player his first four years in the league, this season he’s on the plus side of the ledger. He very well could score 30 goals for the Capitals this season, perhaps as a plus-10, and you have to think he’ll be given strong consideration for a spot on the Czech Republic Olympic entry in Vancouver.

Eric Fehr’s emergence this season is even more exciting in light of the litany of physical ailments he’s endured, his most recent in particular. He endured surgery on both shoulders this past offseason, unable even to feed himself during a portion of his recovery. But you’d never know it watching him play today.

Like Fleischmann, Fehr wasn’t physically ready for the start of this season, but he’s flourished in the moderate minutes Boudreau has accorded him. He put up 12 goals in 61 games with the Caps last season, and he will certainly better that tally this year. Drafted as the Capitals’ first-round selection in 2003, all the hockey world looked to be his oyster as his produced consecutive 50-plus goal seasons for Brandon in the WHL. He then enjoyed a strong rookie campaign in Hershey in 2005-06: 25 goals and 28 assists in 70 games. Then the injuries set in. A mysterious nerve malady that led to a herniated disc in his lower back. Then his shoulders failed him. Really he was never able to get settled into a development groove with the organization. It’s a testament to his perseverance and the Capitals’ patience that this season he is showcasing the hands and knack around the net that had Capitals’ scouts in western Canada so excited six years ago.

Like Fleischmann, Fehr’s worked hard to gain much-needed strength on his frame. Both wingers are considerably stronger on the puck than they were when first called up by the Caps.

Last but certainly not least in emergence this season is 2004 first round pick Jeff Schultz. He didn’t have a strong training camp by any measure, and in the early going he was a healthy scratch on the Capitals’ blueline. Moreover, were it not for Boudreau’s decision to retain eight defensemen coming out of camp, Sarge may have been marketed, but as injuries have ravaged that unit, Sarge has stepped up and logged important minutes, and Boudreau is confident enough in him of late to have him partnered with Mike Green. Sarge’s +15 is good for 5th best in the NHL.

Too many Caps’ fans I think focus on what Schultz is not: a banger, a deft skater, a points producer. But with experience he’s gained an increased awareness of his responsibilities in his own end, and he is particularly disciplined when it comes to taking penalties (12 PIMs in 29 games). Going forward, Schultz is likely to play an important role as a value-for-minutes guy: likely a no. 6 rearguard on a Cup-contending Caps’ club able to be slotted in to a 4 role if injuries set in. The Capitals are certain to have to pony up big dough in the years ahead for the likes of Mike Green, Karl Alzner, and John Carlson; Schultz will offer the team a value sedan among those spiffy sports cars.

The Capitals’ patience with their own assets not only looks wise in the standings today but particularly when juxtaposed against the relative impatience and annual free agency buffet feeding by the likes of Philadelphia, the Rangers, and Montreal. All three clubs were in the playoffs (briefly) last season. All three are on the outside looking in this morning. Championship clubs are seldom so assembled.

The Capitals were welcoming 19-year-old Nicklas Backstrom to Washington that autumn, with no certainty how successful he’d be as an NHL rookie. He hadn’t played much hockey on an NHL-sized sheet. It seemed prudent and wise to not foist no. 1 pivot pressure on the rookie; bringing back Backstrom’s veteran countryman seemed to promise a perfect bit of on- and off-ice mentoring, and allow the club to slot the rookie in a less pressure role on the Capitals’ second or third lines.

And Nylander, skating in Glen Hanlon’s highly structured, deliberate attack, fairly thrived out of the gate in the 2007-08 season. He went for nearly a point per game (37 in 40) before suffering a rotator cuff tear that ended his season. But a last-in-the-East standing at Thanksgiving in 2007 precipitated a coaching change, and as his strong-skating teammates gradually embraced and thrived in Bruce Boudreau’s system, Nylander emerged as an ill-fitting component. All of a sudden there was no home to be found for an East-West pivot in a North-South system.

At long last the Capitals have parted ways with Michael Nylander. And despite the fact that Nylander still has a year remaining on his pact with the Caps, this is no temporary parting. Next year, in his final year with the Caps, Michael Nylander’s salary dips to $3 million, but more importantly, he loses his no-trade leverage. Even more importantly, the Capitals on Monday removed Nylander’s name from his locker, replacing it with new callup Kyle Wilson’s. It’s not going back up. The hunch here is that no matter how the rest of 09′-10 goes for Nyls in Grand Rapids, he won’t seek a repeat of this fall and its uncertainty, isolation, and torment. If he positions himself in the right system next season, somewhere, there is the outside shot he could earn one more pro hockey contract — almost certainly in Europe.

This isn’t a separation with the feint possibility of reconciliation but rather a much-needed divorce.

The Capitals and Michael Nylander this fall have been like the embittered, crumbling couple doing everything to avoid crossing paths with one another at home. Nylander didn’t much show up at Kettler, and the Caps didn’t much want him there. I remember being struck by how out of place Michael Nylander looked in the very opening hours of September training camp: all of his teammates were all smiles and jokes, thrilled to be reunited and tagged as serious Cup contenders heading into the new season.  But Nylander was never a part of the frivolity and camaraderie, on or off the ice. He seemed isolated even in packs of Caps gathered around Bruce Boudreau during drill instructions. I remember writing at the time that he hovered about the training facility as bit of a ghost. It was ghastly. It wasn’t long before Nylander became an actual ghost there.

The Capitals besting Edmonton back in the summer of 2007 for Michael Nylander’s services may well have come down to a fourth year in the terms as well as a no-movement clause that afforded Nylander some stability for his family. George McPhee hasn’t made much of a habit of doling those out in his 12 years in D.C., and on Monday he told media that he “won’t be doing it in the future.” He also said, “The way our team developed he just wasn’t a good fit. There’s not much you can do – that happens in this business.”

Today it looks like Edmonton got the better of that dispute with the Caps, but that’s 20-20 hindsight, and at the time it was terribly important for the Capitals to win a high-profile battle for a coveted free agent. It was with the acquisition of Michael Nylander that the post-lockout Caps first appeared playoff viable. They did make the playoffs that season, but Sergei Fedorov was the aging skilled center helping to make it happen. It was Fedorov’s acquisition that signaled the bell tolling for Michael Nylander in Washington.

Nylander was such a poor fit for Gabby’s system that the Caps couldn’t possibly dress him to try and showcase him for other NHL clubs. Instead, they dispatched him to Grand Rapids of the American League, but even two weeks of productive hockey with the Griffins wasn’t enough to entice even the most injury-ravaged NHL clubs to bite on Nyls’ bank-breaking deal.

The story of Michael Nylander’s second and thoroughly unsuccessful engagement in Washington is the story of the business of hockey, as George McPhee noted — swiftly altering circumstances, a bad injury, a rapidly developing, highly cohesive, strong skating young roster casting as outsider one of its costliest, older parts. Club management and the coaching staff have, as they should have, downplayed the distraction component to this saga, but there can be no mistaking the fact that the Capitals are a healthier hockey club this morning than they were a week ago, with notable salary cap wiggle room. For the rest of the Eastern conference, that can’t be good news.

How are you feeling, Sergei?

“Will wait too long!” [a Russian joke, approximately "We will wait too long I'll start feeling bad."]

What about your first game after coming back? You haven’t played since November 22.

“First of all I am happy that the game turned out to be trouble-free. We held the lead the entire game and won 5-1. There wasn’t a lot of pressure.”

Is your leg still hurting? Are you back to 100%?

“That will never happen. There are no players playing in the NHL who are absolutely healthy. I got better enough to play with physical contact without the pain. That is the most important thing.”

Is that the reason Bruce Boudreau had you playing on the third line to not put too much on you?

“I don’t know Coach Boudreau’s thinking. But our line had the objective of covering Jason Spezza’s line. I managed to get three points. But no one is fixated on personal statistics. The most important thing for me was to get through the game. You know what I mean? Not to get another injury.”

Have you missed hockey a lot?

“A lot. I missed 12 games. It is an awful lot.”

I noticed that there were all smiles when Washington players were shown on the large screen. Is this because injured players have started coming back? You, Mike Green?

“Yes, probably. You can feel the spirit of togetherness with this team. Everyone asks each other, ‘When are you going to play? Come on, buddy, we’re waiting for you.’ Sasha Semin came back a couple of games ago. Now it was my turn… But actually I think that Alex Ovechkin was bored without us.” [Laughs]

Simeon Varlamov is sitting in the locker room with big round eyes now. His debut in Montreal is waiting for him!

“Big round eyes, you say? That’s okay; Simeon will come out on the ice and will forget everything. [OC note: Feds sure predicted that correctly!] Maybe right now he is not feeling quite in his place. But it is good when a person is nervous before an important event. I know it myself.”

Thanks to Capitals Kremlin for reminding us of those classic Rold Gold commercials with Jason Alexander.

So Semin is hurt, and outside of the the team physician and General Manager George McPhee, it’s anybody’s guess as to what’s wrong. His injury isn’t believed to be serious, and he could well play tonight in New Jersey, but that’s not the point. Semin is sizzling, having a career break-through season, and as he’s battled injuries throughout his young NHL career, it’s understandable that there’d be concern about possible recurrence of previous setbacks. We just don’t know.  

Can you imagine if on the Monday after week one of the NFL season the New England Patriots told the world that Tom Brady was out “indefinitely” with “a lower body injury”?

Only late this week did we (sort of) learn about the nature of Sergei Fedorov’s injury (ankle). He should be back in the lineup soon — not that anyone from the Capitals would tell you that. There was this terrific irony last week when Capitals’ defenseman Shaone Morrisonn left a game against Carolina in the second period. Paul Rovnak from the team’s media relations staff moved around the press box informing media of Morrisonn’s suffering a “groin injury” and that he would not be back. Collectively we knew not to bother asking about it in the room after the game — the specificity Rovnak offered (contextually, the revelation of a near state secret) would be replaced by “lower body injury” post-game for the purposes of shielding detail from Caps’ future opponents.

It’s the NHL’s Code of Omerta, and more and more it’s beginning to look needlessly haughty and a relic of the league’s frontier justice days.

Stories are legion in this league, pre-Internet and especially pre-YouTube, of beat reporters being told of a star player’s suffering a bum back when in point of fact his knee was killing him. The old joke is to add or subtract three feet from the stated location of injury to ascertain its true whereabouts. That Fedorov would be comfortable discussing (or have team permission to) the precise region of his injury informs us of its (1) not being very serious and (2) close to being healed.

The NFL of course is engaged in the practice of (largely) full injury disclosure because it kinda values the billions wagered on its games every Sunday, and a reasonable accuracy to its injury reports ensures wagering integrity. I guess we need more wagering on hockey to try and get teams to level with the press and the public.

It isn’t so much that the hockey public has a right to know about injuries; it’s that they’re often left playing ill-informed guessing games about lineups and matchups, and it leaves many of us cold. In such instances we are pushed away a bit from the game we love. There’s a remarkable irony, too, in a league that is perhaps second only to baseball in its preoccupation with stats going quite quiet on players’ basic ability to perform.     

The NHL’s playoffs are where the injury misdirection work by coaches and GMs takes on truly mythic proportions. When the Caps were bounced out of the playoffs in April by Philly the very next morning at Kettler everyone in the media awaited George McPhee’s rundown of the legitimate trauma the GM’s players played with. The details reminded me of the television show ‘M*A*S*H.’

But today, I wonder: how much strategic advantage is truly gained by this shroud of secrecy surrounding NHL training rooms? The protective nature of hockey equipment today is lightyears better than what warriors and retribution artists Gordie Howe and Eddie Shore wore in their day. I don’t deny that hockey’s had a longstanding culture of strategically preying upon skaters weakened by injury. I just don’t think today’s players are anywhere near as vulnerable as they once were.

You may recall that ever so briefly last fall a few NHL players voiced concern about the snug fit of Reebok’s new uniform system. This issue was that protective padding for ribs, for instance, would be more apparent in the new uniforms. But the concern didn’t gain much traction.

There seems to me something distinctly North American about this code of silence in hockey, and so I wonder, too, if the massive influx of European players the past few decades hasn’t further de-legitimatized the need to not whisper a word about injuries. Hockey simply isn’t anywhere near as violent as its once was, and the greatest violence in hockey has always occurred on this continent.

Maybe the league believes that in its secrecy about injuries it cultivates some macho bit of branding for its product. The NHL is known for its clever and successful marketing.     

• A season-altering triumph? It sure had that feeling in the immediate aftermath of a cardiac comeback against the ‘Canes. The Caps were three minutes shy of starting off an important homestand with a frustrating loss to their fiercest and most hated Southeast foe. Then, in keeping with his storybook season, Alexander Semin took a struggling team on his back and willed them to triumph with his magic wrists.  
• It was a World Championships reunion night at Verizon Center. Back in May, the Russian entry in the IIHF World Championships skated a top forward line comprised of Alexander Ovechkin, Sergei Fedorov, and Alexander Semin. They acquitted themselves rather well in the sense that all three finished in the top 5 in tournament scoring: Semin with 13 points, Ovechkin and Fedorov with 12, in 9 games. All three skated in double-digit plus-minus for the tourney, and Ovechkin and Fedorov assisted on Ilya Kovalchuk’s gold medal winning overtime goal against Canada. Caps’ fans following the tourney on line understandably wondered: would the dominant line in one of hockey’s most prestigious events be reconstituted on the Caps in 2008-09? The answer on Thursday night at Verizon Center finally arrived — yes! And before Fedorov departed the game in the third period with a “lower body” injury, there was ample reason for Caps’ fans to wish that the line remain intact the remainder of the season. 
• It really ought to be the best line in hockey. Alluding to the trio’s chemistry, Mike Green in the post-game locker room noted, “They’re best of buds.”  
• In light of the way the Hurricanes’ ’07-’08 season ended last spring, with that stunning home ice loss to Florida opening the door for the Capitals to steal the Southeast title and the division’s lone postseason entry with their 82nd game, you could convincingly suggest that last night was Carolina’s biggest game of the young season. The visitors played a simple, largely disciplined game, and they got high-quality goaltending from elite talent Cam Ward. What the ‘Canes failed to do was win faceoffs (winning just 36 percent of the game’s draws), and they certainly failed to contain Alexander Semin when it counted. 
• A confession: I arrived at the rink somewhat soured on this team’s long-term prospects, and Thursday night’s high drama late masks for another day still significant concerns. The Caps at times Thursday again got “too cute” with their offensive zone attacks, and the home crowd let them know it — particularly in the third period. The development of a reliable “lunchpale line,” a trio of strong and gritty willing to get dirty in front of the net and in corners shift after shift, would I think go a long way to reorienting this team’s identity and alleviating its startling inconsistency. Who would skate on such a line? Chris Clark for sure. Brooks Laich is another candidate. If he could somehow make a position switch, I’d like to see what Eric Fehr could do on such a line.
• Remember Ovi’s monster night (4 goals) against front-running Montreal at Verizon Center way back in January? Don’t you get the feeling that his countryman Semin, in this ‘I’ve arrived’ autumn he’s authoring, is going to have one of those himself? Or maybe three of them?
• Games like Thursday’s have meaning — even season-defining meaning ocassionally. Fully 30 minutes after the game I walked past ‘Canes’ coach Peter Laviolette in the hall outside the visitors’ room. His team was already on its bus. The coach moved slowly, his shoulders slumped, his expression one of thorough, lasting dejection. I’ve seen a lot of disappointed coaches in that hall the past couple of seasons, but none looking quite as agony-ridden as Laviolette. 
• Washington is a town renowned for Redskin quarterback controversies. This autumn, the Capitals have a goaltending one.