The easiest argument for Holtby’s demotion is the team has two goalies it needs to get ready for the postseason. That said, however, who says Holtby couldn’t be the guy to play in the postseason? As it stands now, Holtby has looked like the best goalie in the organization, and, on top of that, he has the numbers to back it up. Perhaps the most overlooked and best part about his performance this year is he has gotten better in almost every single start.

Think for a minute: we saw the best of Michal Neuvirth at the beginning of the season when he was thrust into the starting role with almost no warning. Since then, he hasn’t looked the same and has not posted those same numbers. Meanwhile, Semyon Varlamov had his solid stretch around the Winter Classic when he looked like the impenetrable wall we saw in the playoffs just a few years ago. Other than those games, though, Varly hasn’t stayed on the ice and his team has a big question mark hovering over their goalie stability now. Holtby, on the other hand, has come up and posted solid outings every time he has been called upon, sometimes with very little warning that he will be starting. With the exception of a few stinkers, Holtby has been dominate in the crease and has not had an extended period of time where he hasn’t been good. I don’t think we can honestly say we have seen the very best Braden Holtby yet.

Obviously Holtby hasn’t had the luxury to prove himself in a long-term stint, but he still has looked healthy and ready to start at the drop of a pin, which is more than you can say for Varly. The young Russian looked like the guy for the next decade just a few years ago and now he looks like he might not be on the team next year — all of this because of his injuries, which are coincidentally the biggest reason the Caps need to keep Holtby in Washington.

Neuvy is a fine number one, and, in my opinion, the guy who needs to start in just a few weeks. But what if he gets hurt, doesn’t look the same or falls ill? Then the team has to turn to Varly who hasn’t been able to stay healthy all season. And what if he aggravates his groin? Personally, Varly looks like a liability at this point. Is he really ready to play if needed when the Caps can’t even play him back-to-back games against Ottawa and Montreal? This team should be in tuneup time and not still finding out what they have on their roster.

Washington knows more than anyone that a hot goalie can steal a series and a bad one can cost a city a promising playoff run. Obviously we cannot predict the future, but once the first round rolls around would you be more comfortable with Holtby and Neuvy, two young and healthy guys ready to start at any moments notice, or Varly and Neuvy, two young guys one of whom has been on and off the injured reserve for the last two seasons? I think it is a clear answer.

Some may think I am being unfair to Varly, which I may be, but when it comes to the playoffs, the absolute best needs to be on the team because this same team will most likely not play together again. While some in the organization don’t believe it is “Stanley Cup or Bust,” the truth is they are. Sure, they may not bust many players if they lose early, but some may choose not to return to Washington and retire, like Arnott, some guys may move on, like Schultz, and others just might not make it back to the team.

Truth is, every team is “Stanley Cup or Bust” or they wouldn’t be playing. As a result, the front office has to give this team the best possible goalie tandem to win with. Varly may have been the guy in the past, but from what we have seen this year, it is hard not see the past fading away and see the future of Braden Holtby shining through — a future that should start now.

Playing goalie can be tough on the body and even tougher on the mind. Holtby attempts to counter that with a psychological tool known as visualization. Visualization is when a player sees himself performing on ice and visualizes what it will take to succeed and win in the net. It is a powerful tool to build confidence, focus and calm the nerves heading into game. Golfers do it when they look where they want their shot to go and see it going there before they hit the ball; basketball players do it before free throws, when they see the ball go into the net.

In Holtby’s case, it adds another level to his game, building on his physical attributes and his overall play. Just from looking at his body of work and seeing him between the pipes, it is clear he has the “stuff” to make it as a netminder in the NHL.

Photo by Tim Stough, Inside Hockey

But does he have the mental ability? How many times have we seen goalies who struggled with the “yips” when they make it to the NHL?

We saw it not that long ago with Justin Pogge of the Toronto Maple Leafs. In a 2009 National Post Article, Leafs GM Brian Burke described what makes up a good goalie in the NHL:

“There are four sides to the box that makes up a starting goaltender in the [NHL]. The first three sides are size, athletic ability and competitive spirit … The fourth side dictates whether you can be a starter and that’s mental. Can you handle the pressure? Can you carry a team on your back? Can you not allow a soft goal in the third period? That’s where most goalies fail.”

Pogge inevitably failed, and suddenly a promising netminder was not heard from again. What Holtby has going for him is that he already knows how to conquer that hurdle and how to make sure he has the fourth side. While he may not see it, Holtby’s ability to reel in his emotions and control his mental game allows him to build on his best hockey skill, his puck handling.

Bruce Boudreau has praised it, the media has asked about it, and fans have held the breath when it happens — “it” is, of course, Holtby’s ability to handle the puck out of the net. While Boudreau has said Holtby gets a bit too “cocky” with his puck handling — and I have nearly spit my soda three seats out of the press box when he fails at it — his stick handling gives him an “x-factor” that many goalies do not have. When a goalie leaves the net to handle the puck they are essentially playing roulette, and sometimes they lose. In my opinion, it is his mental stability that allows him to surpass that hurdle and move on when he does turn the puck over or play it incorrectly. His mental stability is his best asset in that situation, allowing him to control his emotions and move on. Goalies need a short memory and it seems as if Holtby has been able to develop one.

While the mental side of Holtby’s game has truly helped him succeed during his time with the Caps this season, it is also where he has the greatest room for improvement, something he has acknowledged. During a conference call on Monday, Holtby talked about how he has tried to work his mental game even more. In the past, Holtby said if he missed anything in his pre-game ritual, it would psych him out: “One of the things I struggled with for a while [was] if I didn’t do something right it would effect me [in the game].” He followed up by saying he now wanted to try to just go through his warmup with ease and be more relaxed.

We all saw how his revised mental game made him even better in Sunday’s game against Chicago. The game was far from Holtby’s best peformance, but he was still able to make several key stops, including a one-on-one right in front of the cage late in the third period. In the past we have seen some soft goals given up by Holtby in pressure situations when he struggles, but not Sunday. He gave his team a chance to win and being able to pull that off when you are not at your best is a tough mental challenge.

Winning when not at his best is what sets this Holtby call up above his last one over a month ago. Though I give him a lot of grief over it, Adam Vingan of Kings of Leonsis was right when he said Holtby didn’t look NHL-ready after a shootout loss against the New York Rangers in January. It was clear he put a lot of pressure on himself, and it seemed to buckle underneath it, as the Rangers deked him out with moves he stopped earlier in the game. His mental game was clearly not there.

That all changed against Tampa Bay at the beginning of March though. The Caps went to a shootout, and it’s fair to say a large part of Washington braced itself, remembering what had happened approximately a month earlier with the Rangers. Instead of folding under the pressure, Holtby looked confident and won. It was at that point he looked ready for NHL responsibility.

As it stands right now, Holtby looks like the true goalie of the future. To harken back to Burke, Holtby has the four pillars of a goalie. He has the size, athletic ability, he is extremely competitive and he seems to have his mental game in check. If anyone was questioning whether he can cut it in the NHL, they just need to take a look at his body of work from last week to change their mind. Holtby was named the First Star of the NHL for that week’s performance, but more importantly, he may have established himself as the No. 1 goalie of the future for Washington. It may not be this year, it may not even be next year, but I bet you Holtby will be the guy. You can hold me to it.

However, I have realized that maybe they are being aggressive this offseason . . . just inside the organization instead of outside it.

This tactic makes complete sense. For the last two seasons, Washington has essentially looked outside the organization for answers to their problems. Whether it was the signing of Mike Knuble and Brendan Morrison, or the trades for Sergei Fedorov, Eric Belanger, Joe Corvo, Jason Chimera, and Scott Walker, Washington has tried to fill holes and add depth by bringing in players from other organizations. Of all these moves, only about three of them could have been said to have worked out, and yet the Caps have not lived up to anything close to their potential in the playoffs.

When the Caps have filled holes from within, however, by promoting Semyon Varlamov, John Carlson, Karl Alzner, and to some extent Mathieu Perreault, the team has found success — in admittedly limited engagements with the young defenders and the young center. To General Manager George McPhee, Head Coach Bruce Boudreau, and owner Ted Leonsis, maybe that is a sign they should use the Hershey Bears to find success instead of the rest of the NHL.

Looking to the back-to-back Calder Cup champions for help in the NHL may be one of the smartest hockey decisions in the league from any team this offsseason. Not only do the Caps not have to spend any money or trade away young assets to alter their lineup, but they also fill their team with players who know how to win and execute Bruce Boudreau’s system– and have done it before.

The first big move of the offseason was made just moments after the Capitals were knocked out of the playoffs by Montreal. We all knew that John Carlson was going to stay with the team; how could he not — he looked great on the ice. But Alzner’s future was somewhat up in the air, until Boudreau essentially confirmed after game 7 that he would be with the team next year. Not only is that great for Alzner (most would agree he has earned it), his promotion would seem to aid Carlson’s continued development. The two had a lot of chemistry on the ice together in the American League — and it is important for a player to feel comfortable when their surroundings change.

Boudreau was not alone in his belief that Alzner and Carlson were ready to contribute full time in the NHL. Many bloggers, including us at OFB, took their performance in game 7 as the sole bright spot from the playoff run. Corey Masisak over at CSN.com saw the pairing as a sign that while Washington may have lost in the playoffs, they had a great shot at being victorious in the long run.

The Caps clearly have a strong set of goaltending prospects, and the position is one of the organization’s strong points in development. This year the Capitals appear poised to use much of that depth. According to Hockeyfuture.com, it is the main reason Washington ranks fourth overall in organizational rankings. Michal Neuvirth was tapped as the team’s backup goalie early in the summer, and for good reason. Not only has he stopped just about everything that has come his way in the minors, and backstopped the Hershey Bears to consecutive Calder crowns, but he has also shown he can hold his own in an NHL game. His ability to handle an NHL workload is important given Varly’s history of injuries and his relatively poor performance in the regular season last year.

The final no-brainer move Washington appears poised to make this fall is with the promotion of Mathieu Perreault to fill a major hole. Washington has been looking for a second-line center since the departure of Sergei Fedorov and has yet to find an adequate replacement. The Brooks Laich experiment didn’t work, Tomas Fleischmann was solid in the faceoff circle at home, but not on the road, and Eric Belanger largely looked out of place. Matty possesses a top-six skill set.

Perreault skates well, has elite player tools, and appears to have no fear, even in corners. Not only does he drive to the net with nifty moves, but he also battles beautifully in the corners, often taking angles there that not only allow him to make plays but also limit his vulnerability there. He’s especially adept at kicking pucks out to teammates in scoring positions. He is not very big, standing only 5’9′, 175 pounds, but he doesn’t play a physically weak game. George McPhee, in speaking to OFB about Matty two summers back, said that if you’re good enough to play in the NHL, you’re big enough to play there. Matty sure looked good in his third- and fourth-line duty auditions in 2009-10, and this summer, it sure looks as if the Caps want him as a primary contender for the second-line center spot.

Perreault’s promotion, while it may be overlooked by many, could have a huge impact on the Caps’ season. A player who can finally quarterback a line with Alexander Semin would give the team two legitimately deadly scoring lines — something it has not only lacked in the regular season, but was an obvious Achilles heal in the playoffs. And Matty possesses a toolbox that is an obvious asset for a second-unit power play.

Even guys who have spent much of their career in the NHL haven’t been able to center a second line, and there is no proof yet that Matty can either. Our friends at Russian Machine Never Breaks believe Perreault could be a boom player, but there is just no guarantee, like anything in the NHL, he will succeed. Still, he’s done everything the Capitals have asked of him in his young pro career — including improving each and every season. There’s one last intangible with Matty I believe is a must to consider, and it’s something that John Walton likes to discuss when talking about players transitioning from the ‘A’ to the National League. Some guys who bear relatively modest numbers in hockey’s second-best league make the jump and just catch lightning in the proverbial bottle. They play bigger in the big league than numbers alone would seem to indicate they should. That sure seems like what happened in 2009-10 with Matty.

After such a disappointing season the Caps’ lack of moves may be a head-scratcher to some. After taking a step back, however, suddenly it seems as if only limited transactions have to take place in order to improve this team. Washington is absolutely loaded with talent in Hershey. Not only is Hershey overflowing with guys primed for professional success, but the whole organization is rich in talent.

Sure, an Anton Volchenkov would have been a nice addition. But he may end up being someone the team doesn’t need. Instead, Washington now has some cap room to play with at the deadline if someone doesn’t work out in a new role or (cross your fingers this doesn’t happen) a major part of the team goes down with an injury. In fact, in retrospect, not making a free agent move was probably the best thing the Caps could do this off-season.

In poker it is rarely smart to bet on the long-shot, that the impossible happens. Play the odds, build on the cards you have, and you have a better shot at winning. Sometimes the best strategy is to simply play the cards you were dealt — particularly when that hand is pretty darned good already.

Photo courtesy of Overtime w/ Bill Rohland

On Wednesday, 106.7′s Overtime w/ Bill Rohland featured a Hershey Bear who’s sure to have a big impact in D.C. this season: Karl Alzner.  According to Tarik:

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but McPhee pretty much said both John Carlson and Karl Alzner will be full-timers in Washington next season. “He’s shown us enough,” McPhee said of Alzner, who scored a huge goal in the first period of Monday’s Calder Cup-clinching win and was a rock on the blue line. “He could have been in the NHL last year. But the way our team was playing last year, we didn’t want to tinker with the chemistry too much and we thought he would be better off if we kept him playing. He’s a guy we expect to be in Washington.”

Listen to the audio here, if nothing else, to hear him explain how he looked like Wolverine for the team photo.

Overtime w/ Bill Rohland can be heard on weekdays from 7-11 PM on 106.7 The Fan.

Tonight is a must-win game for the Bears against the upstart Stars—even more so since the AHL uses the 2-3-2 playoff format. If the Bears want to bring the series back to Hershey (which they obviously do), they’ll need a dominant performance tonight to get back on track. Here’s hoping the boys dig deep and play the fantastic game we know they can.

With time winding down, Nicklas Backstrom took a somewhat foolish(and controversial) cross checking call, which, after Ilya Bryzgalov was pulled, gave the Coyotes a two-man advantage. Behind strong play from rookie Michal Neuvirth and a few great individual defensive plays, the Caps pulled it out. The game was capped with a great feed from Alex Semin to Alexander Ovechkin for an empty net goal in the final 10 seconds.

• A big key to the victory was the Caps’ special teams. They were a letter perfect 5-for-5 on the penalty kill, following a perfect performance in Pittsburgh Thursday night, and 2-for-7 on the power play.

• Tom Poti won the hardhat for the night and for good reason, as he was in on seemingly almost every important defensive play. Karl Alzner had a strong night as well, and his partner Shaone Morrisonn had nothing but good things to say about him, noting in the postgame Alzner’s fundamentals and his play development recognition. Morrisonn also said he was there to offer words of encouragement to his partner as the game went on.

• Kind words also have to be offered for Michal Neuvirth. In his previous two starts earlier this month he got yanked in both. Saturday night, he played with poise, appearing to shake off any doubts or dings to his confidence from his previous outings, and he had to come up clutch on a few Capitals’ breakdowns throughout. Alzner, John Carlson, and Neuvirth at times have all played beyond their years for the Capitals in recent weeks, especially during this six-game win streak.

• While the young guns on defense have been effective, Mike Green’s lackluster play from last night cannot be overlooked. After suffering a mysterious “hand injury” and missing the game against Pittsburgh, Green put up a -1 with three shots, three missed shots, and had four giveaways. On top of all of that, when the Caps needed to buckle down late in the last two minutes he was throwing haymakers in front of the Washington net. He has put a nice season together in the big picture, but nights like last night are a far below his standard.

• A few notes about Saturday night’s press box. Bloggers outnumbered traditional print media by a 4-to-1 margin last night. I don’t know if you want to characterize that as alarming or not, but keep in mind that there was an overwhelming amount of print media present against Philadelphia and Detroit earlier in the week, and many local media even traveled to Pittsburgh, and so the precipitous dropoff last night was conspicuous.

The Phoenix Coyotes are a tremenous, tremendous story this season, lodged in fifth place in the Western Conference, built with an abundance of speed and impressive young skill — they’re a team built to win in the playoffs, in fact. The Coyotes are a typical team for the West, with a strong blueline that not only defends well but can also produce points at the other end. And so it seems local media has a long way to go still in developing a savviness for realizing that meaningful and entertaining and newsworthy hockey isn’t restricted to just the marquee games.

Also of note about last night’s media coverage was that fans in Phoenix were unable to see the game as there was no TV coverage for them: the Caps’ Nate Ewell  also pointed out that there was radio broadcast of the game for Arizona hockey fans but no video broadcast of the game, which is really a shame given how appealing this up and coming club is.

• Last night’s game marked the end of a tough stretch for the Caps in which they either played a perennial playoff contender or a big rival. On Tuesday the team travels to New York to face the Islanders and kick off a stretch where five of their next seven games are against teams who are currently not in the playoffs(NYI, Boston, Florida, Tampa Bay and Atlanta). If they continue to play the way they are and can get a few guys back from injury the Caps can put some nice distance between them and the New Jersey Devils for first overall in the Eastern conference.

• Also worth noting about last night, the Hershey Bears completed a two-game sweep of Manitoba by a final score of 8-2. On the weekend in the series Hershey scored 16 goals and allowed just five. John Carlson, Keith Aucoin, Oscar Osala, Jay Beagle, Andrew Gordon, Chris Bourque and Boyd Kane all scored on Saturday night, while Gordon, Aucoin Bourque, Kyle Wilson, Beagle, Osala, Steve Pinizzotto and Andrew Joudrey scored on Friday. Manitoba brought some injury issues to Chocolatetown, but still, the Bears these days appear able to easily outscore the Redskins on any given night. The Bears have now a club record 14 games in a row at home, and Saturday night also established a new record for attendance at Giant Center with 10,844.

• The wins gave Hershey a total of 70 points on the year, which is 17 more than the number two team in the East Division, the Albany River Rats. Winning sure seems to be in the air in the Washington hockey community.

So it came as no surprise that during the Calder Cup finals our friends in Hershey would help us out again. It was then that pucksandbooks spent some time with Bears’ radio voice John Walton and Tim Leone of the Patriot News, whose biography of Bruce Boudreau will be published this autumn. We needed a lot of help to pull off what we wanted to with this visit — take our pod viewers into both of the special homes to Hershey hockey: the original home, Hersheypark Arena, and Giant Center.

This was a particularly special bit of editing for me to try and carry off. I’m spending the summer back home in Michigan, so I’m editing and blogging remotely. (Already I miss all the Red in Chinatown on game nights.) And pucksandbooks didn’t tell me anything about the video he uploaded to my YouTube account a couple of weeks ago; when I watched the footage of him inside Hersheypark Arena with Tim Leone the first time, and listened to Tim describe a winter Saturday night Bears’ game years ago inside that cathedral of puck, I swear I got goosebumps. 

A *very special* thank you is also in order to Brett Leonhardt, Capitals’ web content guru, who most ably filled in for me up in Hershey and manned the pod camera inside Giant Center. This podcast couldn’t have been carried off without his help.

Lastly, to the entire Hershey organization, from all of OFB, way to go Champs! 

Hello ,

    My name is Brian and I live in Palmyra PA, right outside of Hershey, and I found your web blog this past fall and I check it out everyday with much anticipation to see what I might find next.  I have followed the Bears since the middle 80′s and with the Caps as our parent club I have enjoyed the chance to watch several current Caps play here in Hershey.  Since we do not get to watch the games in CSN your site has helped me with a lot of info so that I can still follow some of them.  Another thing that really impressed me is that you have taken the time to follow Hershey through out the season and especially in the post season even after Washington was knocked out of the playoffs.  I wished that I might see you in the parking lot Sunday, but I was not sure where you might have been.  I saw plenty of cars in the lot with DC, VA plates.  I will end with saying a big THANK YOU ALL for the great job you do here on OFB.  

 

A Frequent reader

Brian