On Frozen Blog

From our vantage, the Washington Capitals have not yet assembled the key roster pieces that ownership and management need to supplement the rebuilding blocks laid during the first two post-lockout seasons — and which can deliver the Caps to springtime viability. Even prior to the trade of Dainius Zubrus, the team lacked a true first-line, playmaking pivot. This offseason, it needs to bring in skilled centers for the first two lines. One position presumably will be filled by 2006 draft gem Nicklas Backstrom of Sweden. Almost certainly the other will have to come from free agency or a trade this summer.

Despite Captain Chris Clark’s 30 goals, there are question marks on right wing. Is Eric Fehr’s back injury chronic? Is there durable chemistry between Alexander Semin and Tomas Fleischmann, and if so, can Semin settle in on the wing to Flash’s right?

Without question Alexander Ovechkin is the face and future of this organization, but his sophomore season brought struggles and frustrations few of us would have imagined last June, when we watched him best Sidney Crosby for the Calder Trophy. Eric McErlain last week well chronicled AO’s season of comparative discontent. He is one of the five most gifted hockey players on the planet today, but his defensive game, underscored by his -19 rating, has a long way to go. An important reminder: he is still a very young hockey player, and developing consistent defensive play takes time.

On the blueline, optimism is to be found with the maturation of Shaone Morrisonn, the precocious promise of Mike Green, the discipline and savvy instincts of Jeff Schultz, and most especially the two-way, bruising play of Milan Jurcina. George McPhee’s highway robbery of Jurcina from the Bs appears to rank among the best trade work of his 10-year tenure in town. But missing from the rearguard corps is a genuine #1 stud: a smooth puck-moving, minutes-eating threat from the point. There’s some shopping to do.

This past campaign was a tale of three seasons: that which ended on Dec. 16, with the team 5 games above .500; the next 25 games, when injury and illness and a brutally congested and difficult schedule sent the squad into a standings free fall; and the trade deadline purging of key veterans as the team settled into the Southeast’s basement. Again.

On the surface, 2006-07’s 70 points suggest a hockey club in standings stagnation. We don’t see it like that. Owner Ted Leonsis this past weekend claimed his team had taken “two steps forward and one back” this season. He also claimed in the season’s final week that the time for “rebuilding” was finished and intimated that “reloading” was more this offseason’s operative word. That seems about right to us.

But this past weekend Ted also made an important point about the imperative of fans trusting in a team’s organic growth. Alexander Semin and his spectacular season, he noted, weren’t achieved via free agency splurging but rather from the astute labor of the team’s scouts as well as Semin’s years of development. That indeed is a blueprint to follow.

The Caps this season shaved off about 20 goals from the 300-plus they surrendered in 2005-06, but next season, they’ll need to lop off at least another 30 to rise to postseason contention. Olie Kolzig, newly turned 37, appears to have at least a couple more high-quality seasons in him (his general manager near the end of this season claimed he could remain an elite netminder through his 40th birthday), and it is our expectation that beginning next season, markedly less of a nightly workload will be thrust upon him: both volume and quality of shots faced need to be reduced.

A repeat disappointment: the Capitals finished near the bottom of the league again in power play efficiency, and in the “new NHL” that is a supreme no-no — special teams are more critical than ever. The team was consistently unable to generate one-timers, and its frustrating pass-pass-pass approach was often painful to watch. Low power play shot production and the lack of anyone camped in the opposing netminder’s crease to provide screens and bang in rebounds (a la Konowalchuk back in the day) made for too much extra-man misery.

Another indication of the team’s anemic power play: only Boston allowed more shorthanded goals than the Capitals. For approximately every five goals the Caps scored with the man advantage, they allowed one the other way. For comparison, Florida (13th overall in power play success) scored more than ten extra-man goals for every shorty allowed.

The lack of an experienced power play quarterback certainly looms over both the team’s poor power play production and its ineffective defensive coverage. With the addition of an experienced defenseman, another year of growth among the Caps’ young d-men, and the continued presence of the Alexes on the top-line power play, one expects to see a marked improvement in the fine alchemy of converting PPs to goals next season. Hopefully Coach Hanlon can convince the players to shoot first and ask questions later.

But the bottom has truly fallen out when it comes to overtime hockey. The Caps lost their last 15 overtime games of the season. It has a fanbase all but averting its eyes during shootouts. It’s not enough to attribute the unwavering extra-session failures merely to inexperience or bad luck. The shootout showings in particular are nothing short of harrowing.

The team is simply surrendering too many pivotal points in extra play. Management’s summer work, it seems to us, must acknowledge and address this. But how? Coach Hanlon has tried allotting the concluding minutes of practices to the shootout, and he tried in the second half of the season to inject new names as his shooters. Nothing has helped. Would a shootout ’specialist’ be included in the team’s offseason wish list?

A fixture of future shootouts will be Alexander Semin. Way back last autumn we thought we saw something special taking place with Semin and this team, and we were right. There were a lot of Semin doubters within the fanbase and media back then, and while his season was marred at times by wretched penalties, his game-breaking talent has few if any rivals in the history of this organization.

Another startling emergence was that of Boyd Gordon. He earned Glen Hanlon’s trust as the team’s most reliable and accountable forward. By January Sidney Crosby was calling him the toughest forward for him to play against. By March he was taking seemingly every important defensive zone draw. A virtual afterthought of the 2002 first round Caps’ draft class, today he joins Semin as another jewel from it.

There were, however, numerous and in some instances surprising struggles. We thought 2005-06 was a breakout year for Brian Sutherby. But we saw little of that two-zone effectiveness this season. Brooks Laich struggled in the season’s first half, after so strong a showing last season, but his game we thought improved appreciably from late January on. Both Matt Bradley and Ben Clymer received multi-year deals this past offseason, but they suffered nagging injuries for most of this season and never seemed able to get in their typical feisty grooves.

Our prediction is that there will be unprecedented competition for roster spots at Kettler Capitals Iceplex this coming autumn, and some prominent names today under contract may be in for a rude awakening then — if not sooner.

For better or for worse, the Caps these days regularly suffer from comparisons with the Pittsburgh Penguins. It’s unavoidable. The league’s marquee stars of the next decade arrived last year in these two cities, both teams have spent most of this decade disappointing their supporters, and they are both endeavoring to arrive at annual and durable Cup contender status with years of patient rebuilding through good drafting. Oh, and they have a bit of a rivalry thing going.

But Pittsburgh’s 47-point improvement this season over last is abberant historically, and it’s replicability is virtually impossible. Seldom does any NHL team enjoy the arrival of game-breaking talents delivered to the roster the same summer, before both knew their 20th birthdays, as the Pens did with both Evgeni Malkin and Jordan Staal this season. And whereas Pittsburgh has benefited from spending most of this decade drafting from the league’s lottery perch, the Caps have but two such selections. A third arrives this June. A year from now would deliver a far fairer barometer of the relative standing of the two clubs.

What looms ahead is the most important offseason for the club in at least 20 years. For the third straight season the Caps finished fifth in the Southeast division. Mandatory improvement next season must be charted less in an arbitrary or specific point total and more in how many division foes the Caps finish ahead of.

We see little value in ascribing a “grade” to a team clearly transitioning from the roster-gutting, rebuild-from-the-ground-up course embarked upon by management in the spring of 2004. Instead, we’d call this season the culmination of a rough continuum begun three springs back by General Manager McPhee. The largess of losing during this period has been painful, but necessary. Now, however, it is both fair and appropriate to hold the architects accountable for robust improvement with the very first game of 2007-08.

The team will have a new look in 2007-08 — new colors and, we’re pretty sure, new logos — but will the roster be overhauled in a volume and substance sufficient to dislodge it from its Eastern conference bottom feeding of recent years? It’s our belief that chronicling that task is going to make for one fun summer.