At the onset of Labor Day weekend, it was most encouraging to see Capitals’ right wing Chris Clark in his training clothes, fresh from rigorous labor out on the Caps’ Kettler ice sheet earlier today.
Word broke about two weeks ago that the team captain had made a significant recovery from the debilitating groin injury that all but shelved his 2007-08 season. Today, I wanted a progress report from him with an eye toward his fitness after a couple of weeks of daily skating at Kettler and with an eye toward the start of training camp in three weeks.
“I have to ask you the obligatory question — you are X percent recovered today, and you believe you’ll be X percent recovered come the start of camp?” I asked.
“One hundred and one hundred,” Clark replied, with a broad smile.
Credit for Clark’s full recovery goes to Vancouver physiotherapist Rick Celebrini, who also supervised ex-Cap Brian Sutherby and his struggles with a nagging groin injury a couple of years ago. Clark will return to Vancouver this weekend, flying out Sunday and spending a couple of days with Celebrini for a final “peace of mind” checkup. But it’s already ’all systems go’ for the former 30-goaler — he has no restrictions in his August training at Kettler.
I asked Clark if he’d wished he’d gone to see Celebrini back in November, just as his injury hit, with the hopes that the celebrated specialist’s treatment might have taken hold and allowed him to return last season, most particularly for the playoff series with the Flyers.
“I thought about that, but the injury wasn’t serious, it was just slow to heal,” he said. In other words, there just wasn’t any urgency to pursue specialized treatment during the first half of the season. Clark’s injury just didn’t mend as such setbacks usually do, and the arrival of the offseason, joined by the prolonged lack of healing, dictated his traveling across the country to see the renowned physiotherapist.
This week also brought news about foreign language and pro sports — the LPGA Tour this week announced that proficiency with English would be mandatory beginning in 2009. It’s an issue that affects the NHL; in the New York Times’ account of the new ladies’ tour policy, it noted that a handful of NHL clubs had a similar requirement in their rooms. I wanted the Caps’ captain’s vantage in the matter – specifically, is English proficiency an issue in the Caps’ room? Has he as captain initiated and promulgated such a policy?
Turns out, even with a handful of English-speaking-challenged players on the Caps’ roster, there are no communications issues. Everyone on the team, Clark noted, recognizes that for the purpose of communications unity, of getting on the same page, the team has to communicate in English.
“I played in Europe, and I gravitated to guys [who spoke English],” Clark told me. “That’s always going to be the case.”
An issue could arise, Clark conceded, if the number of non-English-speaking players reached something akin to a critical mass, but the Caps now don’t have anything close to that challenge, so there is no explicit language policy, dicated by the captain or team management. Even with Alexander Semin, he noted, “he understands English well . . . once in a while, if there’s some confusion, Sergei [Fedorov] or Alex [Ovechkin] will explain something to him.”
I’m not armed with data that allow for a comparison of Washington sports teams though the decades who’ve performed miraculous rises from last-place ashes to first-place perches, as this hockey club has in the past 11 weeks. I’m not sure I need it, though. What the Caps have accomplished just since November 23 is nothing short of miraculous and may qualify as ranking with the most impressive — and most unlikely — resurrections in Washington pro sports history.
Per the Washington Capitals press release:
What did the Washington Capitals accomplish with their preseason this September? A good bit, I think. First and foremost, they accomplished the most important task: they avoided serious injury — we’ve no indication that Alexander Semin’s ankle sprain is serious. The second most significant accomplishment, in my opinion, was seeing a healthy number of fresh faces perform at a high level and well integrate with the returning Caps’ core. Tomas Fleischmann, it appears, has won first line right wing duty. He’ll be centered, at least initially, by Viktor Kozlov. So two-thirds of Washington’s top line is new this season. It looks more playoff worthy than either of its previous incarnations the past two seasons.
The swollen and bruised Russians are dressed and practicing this morning. None were making the trip to Carolina today anyway. Their commarade Ovechkin is anything but beat up; he was in his usual Acela Express super stride, and he made a point of turning this morning’s 9:30 practice partly into his own personal competition with Olie Kolzig, dancing hip jigs at scores and uttering rink-wide-audible, English-blended-with-Russian oaths at his failures, during every drill. (For his part Kolzig didn’t man his crease quietly during the challenge.)
You try and remind yourself that barely a long weekend’s worth of camp has been completed, but with it so compressed now, actually, by day’s end, camp will be about one-fifth completed. The Caps have already made cuts.
As Training Camp slowly (so slowly) approaches, we decided to take a quick look at some of the new faces, returnees, hopefuls and last-chancers that will be vying for a spot in the Caps’ forward corps. Battles at many slots are expected, and this may be one of the most competitive camp in Caps’ history.
