Yesterday a loud chorus of concern arose all about digital D.C. and on talk radio, related to the standing of the Caps as we approach the All Star Game break. It’s well-placed, well-pitched concern, I say.

No longer can spectacularly underwhelming showings like those in Florida this week be written off as exhibitions of a meaningless autumn; post January 1, NHL games take on increased importance, as the league’s trade deadline (February 28) looms and managers must determine whether they are buyers or sellers, and what pieces must be added or subtracted for postseason contention. The Capitals these days are making a compelling case for George McPhee to be a buyer this trade deadline season. And perhaps in bulk.

I stunned my new media colleagues up in the press box early on in the season when I confided in them: ‘I don’t like this team.’ Without even an audition a player (Tomas Fleischmann) whose performance last spring was ghastly was awarded second-line center duty. Today Flash is a member of the Colorado Avalanche, and thriving — on the wing, his natural position. Similarly, there was work to be done on the blueline this past offseason, but there, too, George McPhee deferred. Meanwhile, his GM colleagues all about the East (especially in Pittsburgh and the Southeast) loaded up for bear.

If we were to draft Articles of Impeachment against the Caps near the midway mark of this season, the evidence would be compelling.

DNS is my shorthand for “Did Not Show.” I haven’t had much occasion to use it for a Capitals team since Jaromir Jagr left town. But I am using it this season, and the frequency with which it’s fairly applied is what is perhaps most troubling to me about this team. My list:

• 11/19 ATL (0-5)

• 11/22 NJ (0-5)

• 12/9 FLA (0-3)

• 12/12 NYR (0-7)

• 1/12 TAMPA (0-3)

There isn’t a juggernaut among that list, either. Six shutouts already for a team bearing (ostensibly) four or five high-scoring stars? And that’s not merely five super lousy efforts listed above; (there have been those as well); that’s five outings halfway through the season for which the team arrived at puckdrop lifeless, indifferent to the game’s developments as it progressed, and remained that way for the full 60 minutes. These were betrayals of the crest. Impeachment-inaugurating instances of infamy.

In the case of the Caps and the Southeast division this season, shockingly, the three-time defending champions may well be underdogs to win it. Last season the Caps won the Southeast by nearly 40 points, and largely through attrition and promotion, were believed to have strengthened their roster in the offseason. Wednesday night in Tampa first place in the Southeast was at stake. The hosts had shut out the Caps in D.C. the previous week. As “big games” in winter go, this was a big one. Not only didn’t the Caps score again against Tampa, they didn’t show up for the showdown.

Again.

This fanbase is showing up alright — in hordes, over great travel. You notice the Red-out behind the team bench every night on the road. The least this club can do is show up.

I’d be the first in town to suggest that the NHL’s regular season is meaning-deficient, and I fairly led a chorus that noted back in fall that this regular season especially was going to be meaning-challenged for this club. But there’s a difference between skating inconsistently, picking your spots for inspired play, out of a deficit of motivation, and not showing up for games at all.

A team hopeful of contending in the NHL postseason generally needs at least two solidly productive forward lines. These Caps don’t have one. Across the board of the skilled forward corps there is conspicuous under-achievement.

The young goaltending was thought by some to be a potential Achilles heel heading into the season. Not so; the dynamic duo of Neuvirth and Varlamov is blameless for this mess.

The defense is improved, as Scott Hannan has helped forge an effective first pairing on the blueline. John Carlson and Karl Alzner have exhibited conspicuously few growing pains, and on more than a few nights in the season’s first half have been the best blueliners in red. Jeff Schultz, no longer overmatched in matchups up top, has struggled still at times (hello -3 Wednesday); that +50 of a season ago was certainly a mirage. Tom Poti swiftly has become brittle. (He’s back on the shelf again.) Both members of that third pairing have new, multi-year contracts. Not cheap ones, either. It’s more than $5 million in third-pairing partners the next couple of seasons. Question for the GM: What exactly was the urgency to get Poti re-upped so early in autumn?

Increasingly we are encountering inventive excuses for the Capitals’ disturbingly deficient play this season. Carolina Hurricanes’ General Manager Jim Rutherford recently suggested with a straight face that Alexander Ovechkin is playing possum. Our owner this week suggested that his players are “subconsciously pacing themselves.”

Maybe there’s another excuse: Maybe there was work to be done this past offseason, it didn’t get done, and now the team is trying to alter on the fly. High crime, that.

Also: Where is the leadership?

On the front of aesthetics, there is yet more damning evidence. The Capitals achieved Golden Team status — and Winter Classic invitation — on the basis of brandishing a beautiful, fanbase growing brand of razzle-dazzle, one which showcased a new generation of hip Young Gun talent. It was a style the league understandably wanted to grow the sport upon. Well, that’s been abandoned. Today in its place is the trap. Caps’ games these days are close to unwatchable, even in barely-eeked-out victory.

Stylistically, the Caps are the Nats in skates. Or maybe that’s giving them too much credit; the Nats at least have an identity (dull). The Caps are experiencing an identity crisis.

And what of the Red Army’s rightful expectation of patronizing a regular season of achievement and distinction? This hockey club wasn’t marketed on a season-long experiment of blight and confusion and identity crisis. Things didn’t work out in 2009-10, but there was the franchise-best 14-game winning streak of January and February, and sweeping the Pens. What is there about this season to date to hang a touque on? January 1 — won with the aid of a monsoon — and little else. Isn’t part of following a full-fledged contender enjoying the journey from autumn through spring? The Capitals this season are affording their fanbase precious little to relish and savor.

Once upon a time not long ago we watched a Red Force unleash its fury. Theirs was the hot ticket in town. A city fell in love with the spectacle. Faces for game nights were painted red.

Today faces are reddening with anger.

Hannan, 31, tips in at 6 ’1, 225. Over the course of his 11 NHL seasons he’s been a 22-minute-a-night pillar of own-end accountability. His reputation is as a shutdown specialist who blocks a lot of shots — commodities in short supply on the D.C. blueline in recent seasons. Some reaction among the D.C. bloggerdom yesterday seemed to get bogged down in diminishing Hannan’s bona fides as a tier I physical force.That exercise I think misses the point; there is jam to Hannan’s game, and as such he’ll well compliment Jason Chimera and Matt Hendricks as recent additions made by McPhee that in total, weighed with departures named Morrisonn, Belanger, Morrison, and now Fleischmann, invite the view of the moves as reparations for an excess of previous finesse.

Which is to say, the Caps today are tougher to play against. Appreciably. You can view the Capitals’ playoff shortscomings of the past three seasons as bouts of bad luck melded with inexperience if you so choose, but seven-game series expose the fatal flaws of their victims. I’ve been a voice suggesting that experience aside, the Caps the past three years fielded rosters that fundamentally haven’t exacted a physical price from their foes. And to no small degree that is what postseason hockey is about. You want to help make sure that what should be a five-game series against an inferior foe in April doesn’t make it to seven? Spend games one through four demanding that your adversary pay a punishing price. No such demand was placed upon the small Habs’ forwards of last April. Instead, Montreal built an ugly box, kept the Caps on the perimeter, got quality netminding, and effectively counter-punched.

My most vivid association of Hannan is with his work on the San Jose Sharks’ blueline in the middle portion of this decade, when he was exceptionally effective in making life miserable for Colorado’s Peter Forsberg in the postseason. I imagine that labor inspired Colorado’s acquiring him. Like Tomas Fleischmann, Hannan is an unrestricted free agent at season’s end; the financial risk with this acquisition therefore is minimal. Still, he represents something quite different from Joe Corvo.

The Capitals have for some years needed to become grittier on the blueline. That’s not merely my opinion but something quite close to consensus sentiment among league observers. Greg Wyshynski articulated it on video for this site just this past Sunday. And in gleaning over the deal yesterday Wyshynski offered this take:

“We’ve said the Capitals needed a Hannan-type before, and now they have Hannan. Fleischmann’s an enigmatic player who can still thrive away from the Caps’ offensive talent. But Hannan’s a coup here for Washington, and getting him well before any trade-deadline bidding wars is even better.”

Anyway, grittier where it’s most needed the Caps became yesterday. And grit in front of your own cage is important at all times but especially in the postseason, when nightly the games are closely contested, clogged and ugly in the middle of the ice. Hannan clogs and ugly-fies.

It’s difficult to disassociate this deal from the 7 seconds that ended regulation play in the Caps’ most recent game, at home Sunday night against Carolina. Guarding a 2-1 lead with the draw in their own end, the Caps replaced a fatigued John Carlson and Karl Alzner with Tom Poti and Jeff Schultz. It matters little whether Poti blew an assignment or there was miscommunication between his partner and him; once Eric Staal badly beat Dave Steckel on the draw and bull-rushed the Capitals’ cage there was little that pairing could do about it. It was an overmatch moment. Planted with impunity in front of Semyon Varlamov, Staal batted in a rebound just two seconds before the final horn while the Caps’ defenders looked on.

You can allege that Scott Hannan represents merely “veteran depth” on a relatively well performing Capitals’ blueline if you want, but then you confront this question: did McPhee have to acquire a nearly $5 million-a-year rearguard just for that? And part with an offensively gifted 26-year-old fresh off a 23-goal campaign? No, we know that Scott Hannan is a good deal more than veteran depth because of the calendar. Back in August the Capitals brought into town free agent burly defenseman Willie Mitchell, and auditioned him here at some length. Ultimately Mitchell signed with LA. When asked yesterday by the media when his interest in Scott Hannan ignited, McPhee acknowledged . . . August — either coincidental to his club’s pursuit of Mitchell, or rather immediately after it.

Yesterday’s deal absolutely was foreshadowed by the vetting of Mitchell in the summer.

* * * * *

A dynamic performer in hockey needs a compliment to become something more than merely a numbers producer. When the Capitals had the offensively gifted Sergei Gonchar that impressive Russian talent and his menacing impact didn’t truly bloom until the Caps paired him with stay-at-home steady Joe Reekie. It was a wonderfully effective pairing; Gonch could rush and pinch, knowing that Reekie had his back. Mike Green has yet to be paired with so steady a defensive partner in D.C. At first blush, Scott Hannan offers this promise, the moreso with his nearly 800 games of NHL experience. And if this proves to be the case, if Hannan proves to be the Reekie Green so badly needs, George McPhee will resign him, and HockeyWashington will look back on Tuesday’s trade as historically significant.

* * * * *

Not to presuppose such a pairing next postseason, but $5 million dollar blueliners generally are stored up front. Hannan is a left shot to Green’s right. But the next few weeks, or longer, are appropriately a period for Bruce Boudreau to experiment a bit with his blueline. Let us see what chemistry emerges among which pairs. All that we seemingly know for sure is that there’s a strong likelihood of a Carlson-Alzner pairing continuing to prosper through next spring and beyond. I would also not be surprised in the least if come spring a game’s white-knuckle final 7 seconds are defended by Hannan and John Carlson.

* * * * *

All manner of spiritedly-shouted reactions on line yesterday aside, we don’t yet know whether — or to what extent — Scott Hannan will be successful in Washington, any more than we did with Joe Reekie at the time of his acquisition from the Lightning, or Sergei Fedorov in that 2008 deal with Columbus. Or scores more like them. Trade analyses, even by the best in the business, all too commonly transpose one set of circumstances a player played under in one setting onto those in his new one, irrespective of systems discrepancies and wholly different personnel and an entirely new coaching staff.  It’s a fool’s errand. NHLers of distinct skill whose games grow stale occasionally need a change of scenery, no more. Certainly that’s Colorado’s expectation with respect to Tomas Fleischmann.

A parting word about Flash. No Capitals player disappointed as much last April against Montreal. I’m not sure he recovered from it. He was scratched of course in game 7 after six atrocious outings. He looked positively lost in that series. And that after a breakout regular season. And injury apparently played no role in his springtime demise. He had what might charitably be termed an average camp this autumn, then struggled right out of the gate trying to secure the Capitals’ second-line center audition. I’d look for the Avs to try him at left wing, which may be his most natural position.

But his being dealt is important in the maturation of the Capitals’ front office in its pursuit of a Cup. Flash, a 2002 Red Wings’ draftee, was acquired in the McPhee deal that shipped out Robert Lang during the great pre-lockout selloff, prelude to the rebuild. The organization made a sizable investment in Flash’s development here. He was widely believed to be a part of the contending core. To part with him as they have suggests to me at least management’s acknowledgment that time is of the essence, that the window of Cup contending opportunity isn’t open-ended.

Yesterday management pushed more chips in the center of the poker table. George McPhee and his management team are to be commended for acknowledging an architectural shortcoming intrinsic to this 120-pt. Capitals’ club, and aggressively addressing it.

Sound familiar?

Seven games in and in all but one of them (New Jersey) the Caps have underwhelmed. Maybe they’re playing possum. Maybe they miss Mike Green that much. Or maybe, just maybe . . . George McPhee is savagely wrong, and it wasn’t merely a five-day anomaly last April that undid the Caps; maybe instead they’re a fundamentally flawed club as they’ve been assembled. They’ll outgun the majority of opponents they’ll face this regular season, but that means nothing in the big picture.

The center position right now is a royal mess. We’re as excited as anyone about the toolbox Marcus Johansson brings — and he was a lone bright light on Thursday night in Boston — but at an important position on an ostensibly contending club he’s engaged in on the job training. Necessarily. He has a grand total of one point in six hockey games, which isn’t so good if you’ve got him as a fantasy player. Explain to us please why he isn’t apprenticing in the American League? Caps’ brass articulated a conspicuous commitment to Johansson prior to his even taking Development Camp ice back in July. Apparently we’ll just have to live with his growing pains and wait to see if production eventually follows. But from where we sit the more experienced and productive center was jettisoned to Hershey by virtue of his optionable contract. Meanwhile, Nick Backstrom is AWOL; Tomas Fleischmann is what he’s always been in his pro career: quite impressive one night, quite invisible the next. The position, which was fairly identified as a vulnerability in the offseason, looks in disarray early on.

About Mike Green. We know better than to attempt to divine the actual extent of his shoulder injury. But it is a shoulder injury, and thanks to Chris Pronger, Greener has a vulnerability there. Stinger . . . slight separation . . . worse . . . who knows? But this finesse blueline can’t go long without him.

The Caps’ top line eventually will get its MoJo back, but while it’s absent, this perimeter hockey club will struggle.

Friday night’s season opener started in stunning fashion with a collapse by the Thrashers’ starting netminder Ondrej Pavelec. A little over two minutes into the game, positioned outside his crease with the draw in the Capitals’ end, he seemed to motion to the Thrashers’ bench as if he was in trouble, and a second later he was flat on the ice, frighteningly motionless. He remained that was for some minutes before being removed on a stretcher. Reports suggest he’s okay now; he was kept in an Atlanta hospital overnight for observation.

Friday night kinda looked like Montreal II, didn’t it? Inferior opponent, blocking shots all over the ice, doing the things necessary to win . . . while the Caps seemed content to mostly play a perimeter game. The Thrashers blocked 23 Caps’ shots.

The Thrash are improved — how couldn’t they be? — but last night they competed against an opponent largely disinterested in doing the things necessary to win an NHL game. Wasn’t there a movie, or perhaps a comic book, titled ‘The Invisibles’? Here’s our list of invisibles who wore white sweaters Friday night:

• Eric Fehr . . . just AWOL.

• Tomas Fleischmann . . . He appeared to pick up where he left off versus Montreal in April — one lone shot attempt from the second-line center.

• Nicklas Backstrom . . .  just out of synch, ineffective.

• Ovi, during the game’s first 30 minutes: a wee bit of banging in the game’s second half, a nice assist on Mike Knuble’s goal, but otherwise of little impact.

In the opening game of the season the Capitals were largely lifeless. And on the bench, Craig Ramsey’s system sure seemed to confound Bruce Boudreau.

Two years ago, when the Caps opened up with a stinker in Atlanta, they had an excuse. It was Jose Theodore’s first game as a member of the Caps, and he definitely let in some softies. This year, there are no such excuses. Michal Neuvirth gamely kept the Caps in it, making numerous high-quality stops, but ultimately he had little support in front of him. It was not a night that bolstered confidence in the new-look Capitals’ blueline.

John Erskine also made his presence known with some strong physical play — he cared last night, and  he stood up for his netminder. Alexander Semin made an amazing knee-high snare of a cross-ice pass from Fleischmann to earn an assist on the Caps’ first goal.

But overall, the Caps’ limp debut is best forgotten, by fans and team alike.

Otherwise, Sunday’s action was confined to group B’s end of the ice, as C’s line of Jason Chimera, Mathieu Perreault, and Eric Fehr inflicted heavy damage in the second stanza en route to a 5-0 white-washing. Perreault was a standout performer on the afternoon, notching a goal, an assist, and setting up his linemates for numerous other outstanding scoring opportunities. Andrew Gordon, Keith Aucoin, and Francois Bouchard also offered active and productive shifts for group C, and accounted for the scrimmage’s first tally. Bruce Boudreau credited group C’s waves of forward unit speed, preying upon a relatively young and inexperienced set of B blueliners (excepting Tom Poti and John Erskine). Boudreau counted three breakaways by Chimera alone.

But B, bearing the line of Brooks Laich, Flash, and Alexander Semin, ought to have established more of an offensive threat. On this second day of camp, though, it wasn’t meant to be for B.

(At last year’s camp I wrote about potentially incorporating the names of Capitals’ greats from the past as identifiers for the groups in the Duchesne Cup competition. Team Langway, Team Hunter, Team Kolzig, that kind of thing. Would be so much more interesting — and less awkward a set of identifiers — than the lifeless alphabet approach. Maybe next year.)

On the dasher boards in front of both player benches at Kettler this season there’s a new message carried out in a bright red banner and white lettering: ‘Building America’s Hockey Capital.’ It’s no clever corporate sloganeering, just a faith statement seemingly crafted by this message- and branding-savvy hockey organization. It seemed an accurate and appropriate claim to broadcast on this sunny, still-summer NFL Sunday as an overflow crowd packed the practice facility. The popularity Perreault achieved among the red-clad in Verizon Center last season apparently has carried over to KCI and training camp this fall. Urgings on his behalf could be heard regularly as he quarterbacked an impressive attack during the scrimmage.

Boudreau isn’t being coy about the pairings he’s assembled on camp’s first weekend. He’s admitted that he’s paired John Carlson and Karl Alzner together based on reports and first-hand vewings from Hershey last season, where the pair formed what many American League observers regarded was the best blueline duo on the circuit, as well as the pair’s success briefly in Washington last spring. And so the Chimera-Perreault-Fehr grouping up front could be more than a whim of an experiment as well at this camp.

Andrew Gordon got C’s onslaught started in the first frame off a deft setup from Aucoin. Brian Fahey, who skated with Lake Erie of the American League last season, formed an effective blueline pairing with Joe Finley on Sunday and sent a dribbler through traffic and past Michal Neuvirth to send his squad into the first intermission up 2-0. The first two frames were contested on a running clock, but it didn’t run fast enough for group B in the second stanza. A Chimera breakaway made it 3-0. And on a power play Perreault executed a superb keep-in high in the offensive zone that led to an Eric Fehr tap-in to make it 4-0. Perreault then finished the scoring cleaning up a rebound not long afterward.

It’s the most important audition to date in Perreault’s life. He’s off to a flying start.

I swear I haven’t exchanged private Tweets or email with Rosen, who wrote this:

“The Capitals were clearly a flawed team last season, even though they won the Presidents’ Trophy. They lacked a defensive stopper who could shut down Michael Cammalleri in their first-round loss to Montreal, when they blew a 3-1 series lead. Alexander Semin, who has enough talent to be one of the League’s best players, was basically invisible for the entire series. Tomas Fleischmann, a 23-goal scorer, was scratched. Norris Trophy candidate Mike Green had a second straight forgettable postseason . . . Making life just a little bit tougher for the Caps is the increased talent throughout the Southeast Division. They’re still the heavy favorites, but winning the division for the fourth season in a row might not be as easy as it was in 2009-10.”

“McPhee has the pulse of this club — and even though no one is saying it, he has to be thinking that he could pay a big price if the Caps experience another playoff disaster. Expect him to go to work on this roster in preparation for the big show in the spring.”

Couldn’t agree more, and I hope Rosen’s right that our GM’s roster work isn’t done.

Really right.

This is what Umberger said after his Columbus Bluejackets lost a close game at home to the Caps just a couple of weeks ago, right before the start of the NHL postseason:

“They float around in their zone, looking for breakaways and odd-man rushes.

“A good defensive team is going to beat them (in the playoffs). If you eliminate your turnovers and keep them off the power play, they’re going to get frustrated because they’re in their zone a lot.”

Funny thing is, the Capitals were so ineffectual in combating Montreal’s defensive structure in the back half of this series that no volume of power plays would have aided their cause. The Caps, a team that from November on flirted with 30 percent efficiency on the power play, and finished at the very top of the league in the extra man category, managed just a single power play tally in 33 tries in this series. Call that culprit no. 1.

• Culprit no. 2 was a club of spectacularly underachieving mega-millionaires, Mike Green and Alexander Semin foremost among them. Green was hurt last postseason, and so this was to be a spring of redemption for him. Hardly. In this series he hardly staked a defense against his being left off the Canadian Olympic hockey team (the one that won gold without him). He wasn’t one-dimensional in this series, he was zero dimensional.

• As for Semin, his enigma aura ebbed at its lowest with this series. The 40-goal scorer of the regular season pumped 44 shots on goal against the Habs, but the overwhelming majority of them were of the low quality variety. He fired and misfired indiscriminately. He was part of a second line that failed to tally a single goal in the series, sweeping away the vaunted offensive depth the Caps were envied for all season long. His talent is prodigious, but his disappearing act has worn out his welcome in Washington.

No championship-aspiring hockey club can survive having its best players go AWOL. And when pitted against a team committed to playing team defense, executing it spectacularly for three consecutive, series-concluding games, one committed to shot-blocking until there are bruises on top of bruises, finesse almost always loses out to guts and drive. The Habs, to a man, were sacrificers. So sacrificers opposed a club of pretty-finesse, with a great goalie backstopping the sacrificers. Who would you wager on in the NHL postseason?

You’re too soft, especially on the back end, bloggers began alleging after last spring’s failure. Pittsburgh, too, had high-end skill selected high in the draft, and when it underachieved Pens’ management brought in piss-n-vinegar bodies like Hal Gill and Bill Guerin and, guided by an American League bench boss tapped in mid-season, solidly outperformed the Caps last postseason and went on to win the Cup. Gill and Guerin could have been acquired for a song.

• Culprit no. 3 was Montreal netminder Jaroslav Halak. Over the series’ final three games Halak stopped 128 of the 131 shots he faced: 37 of 38 in game 5; 53 of 54 in game 6; and 41 of 42 in game 7. It’s likely that the absolute youngest of Red Rockers won’t see a three-game performance the likes of Halak’s in this series in his or her lifetime. Necessarily one of playoff hockey’s greatest feats of goaltending came against the Caps.

• Culprit no. 4 — more damning than any other — was having a roster constructed for a non-checking beer league, rather than a Stanley Cup. Hal Gill was a cornerstone of the Pittsburgh Penguins’ club that snuffed out the Caps last spring, and of course he was a shot-blocking and stifling slot presence in this seven-game series. New media began questioning the finesse architecture of the Capitals gong back to last fall’s training camp. George McPhee gambled on Gabby’s system. This morning, there are very serious questions about it, and about the man who devised it and especially about his role as an in-game tactician.

Gabby’s system, in its essence, says: you can sit back and clog all you want but ultimately my offense will overpower you. George McPhee — including especially with his trade deadline acquisitions of Eric Belanger and Joe Corvo — spent the past few years assembling a quick finesse roster in support of it. The Penguins and their power forwards dominated it down low last spring. A 33-point shortcomer Montreal club relatively easily defended it this one. As George McPhee ponders changes to his roster for 2010-11 — and there will be changes, there have to be changes — he’d do well to think about acquiring more players in the mold of Jason Chimera.

• Playoff failures accumulated over multiple seasons help a manager thin his herd. Certain players possess a look of calm with a postseason’s pressure — Boyd Gordon and Jason Chimera do, Alexander Semin and Tomas Fleischmann do not.

• The Jose Theodore tenure in D.C. is over. I stand by my initial assessment of his signing: he didn’t perform as an elite netminder when it counted; his signing did not advance the Capitals’ Cup aspirations but rather delayed them.

• Bruce Boudreau has coached 225 NHL regular season games and earned a gaudy .701 winning percentage in them. In the postseason, however, he is a conspicuous 13-15. Unacceptable.

This was the healthiest Capitals’ club that’s ever competed in the NHL postseason. They competed hard — their coach last night found no fault with what his players left out on the ice. We are therefore left to conclude that the club was insufficiently constructed, beginning with uncertainty in net and exacerbated by disproportionate finesse at the expense of old time hockey throughout the roster. There should be no more talk of a Stanley Cup in this town before inferior opponents are impaled, bloodied, and battered  in successive series in the postseason.

Something unsavory happened to Alexander Ovechkin at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver. He returned from the games an altered hockey player, and not altered for the better.  He put up points all right in March and April, but somewhat shockingly he lost both the Richard and Ross trophies, having skated a heavy favorite’s claim to them through the first two-thirds of the season. He earned two suspensions in 2009-10, and after the second one never seemed to regain his bad-ass ways. Alexander Ovechkin, captain of the Washington Capitals, needs to return to Washington in the fall his old bad-ass self, blasting bodies through the boards again and apologizing to no one for it. Canadian media will freshly pillory him for it. But how are they treating him right about now?

And it would greatly help Washington’s heavy hockey heart if in a few months’ time he was surrounded by a handful of new bad-asses.

After two periods Friday night, with a seriously outworked Capitals’ team trailing Tampa 3-1, I entertained thoughts of asking Bruce Boudreau in the postgame just how important 120 points and a President’s trophy is to him and his club. I’m glad I didn’t. The coach was in no mood for questions generally, and most especially what mine might have implied: that in the interest of getting 25 bodies sweaters for skates over the season’s final month-plus, he’d occasionally forsake suiting up his best lineup, and potentially sacrifice standings points.

The coach did claim that no matter who he dressed for whatever game his ought to be able to get three goals and a good effort. He got neither Friday night. Still, the guess here is that we won’t see again another game this season without both Jeff Schultz, the team’s leader in blocked shots and a solidly disruptive presence in his own end, and the highly ascendant John Carlson.

Tomas Fleischmann was back at center Friday night, spelling the scratched Eric Belanger, and he scored a beautiful power play goal, his 20th on the season, joining five other Caps who’ve tallied 20 or more on the campaign. He also won 55 percent of his faceoffs. But he’s a natural wing, as the acquisition of Belanger demonstrated.

That the Capitals’ effort Friday night was substandard was beyond dispute. The coach acknowledged it, his players acknowledged it, and most conspicuously the home crowd, in fits and bursts, acknowledged it with boos.

Antero Nittimaki was solid in the Tampa net but hardly spectacular; he didn’t have to be. The Capitals didn’t work hard enough to make his night difficult.

Nittimaki called his team’s 3-2 win “probably the best road game we played all year. Not just because we beat Washington. The overall game. They came pretty hard beginning of the second period, first ten minutes, but other than that we were in total control the whole time.”

“Once they started to believe they could win, they won every battle and they outworked us,” Boudreau said. “It’s pretty simple if you go through the motions, if you don’t work hard, you can’t win.

Tampa Bay, like every other Southeast foe the Caps face these days, is more than 30 points behind the division champions. But their victory Friday night wasn’t fluky, it wasn’t lucky. Luck is the residue of work and desire, the coach intimated in the postgame.

“It’s very rare where games are won where luck is the outcome. If you’re not working hard you’re not going to get one to bounce off you in front of the net like Lecavalier [did]. They worked hard, so it bounced in. He put himself in position and he worked hard to get in front of the net. Did we do it enough? No we didn’t. We didn’t do it enough.”

When the Capitals lost to Dallas on Monday night the coach came into his postgame presser smiling and cheerful. You can’t much question a 50-plus shot effort, nor the caliber of Marty Turco’s stonewalling. When his team nearly lost to Carolina on Wednesday again he was his usual amusing and reflective self afterward. But on Friday night Bruce Boudreau was red-faced and curt and clipped in his postgame responses. He was so disappointed with his team’s effort that he called into question the future of his player rotation plan, beginning perhaps with this Sunday’s game in Chicago.

More game observations from OFB’s Alex Perlmutter:

• The Capitals relied too heavily on their powerplay last night, scoring twice on their four man-advantage opportunities. Towards the end of the game, it seemed as if they were waiting around for a penalty to be called on Tampa Bay — granted there were some questionable non-calls on both ends of the ice.

• Bruce Boudreau was quick to defend Semyon Varlamov after the game, saying the whole team hung him out to dry at points. I would agree with coach’s assessment, but when your goalie lets in a softy to let the other team take the lead — in the final minute of a period at that — the team gets a bit discouraged. Most of the forwards were on their game tonight including most of the powerplay guys, but the defense was extremely sloppy in their own end. On several occasions, the defense’s lazy marking and sloppy outlet passes cost the home team. Had the lateral feeds at center-ice been tape-to-tape, this game would have turned out much differently.

• Tampa Bay had a terrible penalty kill last night, but five-on-five they were stellar. The Lightning closed down the slot — simple as that. Think of a highway work zone, where the speed limit is reduced and traffic becomes excruciating. That was Tampa’s own-zone defensive system, and it worked perfectly. Even though the Caps held the zone for shifts at a time, Tampa was happy to keep the play on the boards and apply pressure there.

“They scare the heck out of me,” Bruce Boudreau said in the aftermath of his team’s 4-3 overtime survival test against the 13th-in-the-East Hurricanes. The Capitals, who has a 13-game home winning streak snapped on Monday night, earned a standings point in their 15th consecutive game at Verizon Center.

Carolina was the last team to enter Verizon Center and emerge victorious in regulation time, back on December 28, a 6-3 smackdown that wasn’t as close as the score indicated. That game was an outlier in this longstanding grudge match. The Caps won a pair of one-goal games preceding the end-of-year blowout. Wednesday night at Verizon Center it was more migraines from the ‘Canes for the Caps.

There’s precious little chance of Carolina qualifying for the postseason, and that’s a good thing as far as Boudreau is concerned. He made plain his preference not to see them in the postseason.

But this wasn’t just another ornery and closely contested Caps-’Canes affair; it marked the first between the clubs since last week’s deadline trades which sent Brian Pothier and Oskar Osala to Raleigh and Scott Walker and Joe Corvo to D.C. Pothier’s homecoming was a strange one.

“I’ve been here for a long time,” the weirdly white-sweatered no. 5 said. “The family is still here, they’re in school, we’re invested in the community, and we spend our summers here. We love it here.”

“To come back, it was really weird. It was awkward playing against the guys. A couple of times I felt myself wanting to tap a guy on the shin pads who had the red jersey instead of the white.”

A microcosm of Carolina’s fiery determination against the Caps could be seen Wednesday in the battering ram ethos of left wing Tuomo Ruutu. The seventh-year pro has nice numbers on the season — 13 goals, 19 assists — but on Wednesday he went wrecking ball against the Caps, delivering a team-best six hits, many of them punishing. In fact, he crushed Nicklas Backstrom in the third period, back behind Jose Theodore’s goal, igniting a vengeance-minded Capitals’ captain to go on a wrecking spree of his own on the same shift.

For the second consecutive game the Capitals surged to a 2-0 lead over their visitors but again couldn’t hold it, pushed again into an extra session. Their even getting that far was contingent upon another strong outing from Jose Theodore, who turned aside a penalty shot by Brandon Sutter in the first period and a pair of Hurricanes’ breakaways later on.

Theodore got help from some big young guns who’d been quiet of late in the goal scoring department. Alexander Semin opened the scoring — he has 22 goals in 27 career games against Carolina — and Mike Green added a pair of tallies, his 16th and 17th on the season.

Boudreau on Wednesday made a pair of surprising scratches of two players who’ve performed well for him in 2010 — Jason Chimera and Eric Fehr. They were simply players whose numbers came up in the sitting game this team must employ from here on out.

“It is March 10th and the playoffs don’t start until about April 18th, so I don’t want to set the lineup and then have someone get hurt and have to put someone in who has been out for 30 days,” Boudreau said, “it’s not fair to the player and it’s not fair to the team.”

“We’ll keep rotating guys in and out of the lineup to keep them fresh and sharp . . . they’re doing it [sitting] for the common goal.”

It was Tomas Fleischmann’s turn to sit against Dallas on Monday night, and on Wednesday, on his very first shift with center Eric Belanger, in overtime, his one-timer past Manny Legace spoke dramatically for his remaining in the lineup.

“It’s a little message — don’t sit me out again,” Flash said, flashing a big victory grin.