by Kevin Klein
Well, it’s about that time of year again: February, the month approaching the trade deadline. In recent seasons this stretch of the season has been one of some interest— if not relative comfort— for Capitals fans. The team would have mostly settled into the Southeast throne, a top 3 seed in the playoffs all but cemented, as they brooded over the trade market, seeking the proverbial missing piece to the puzzle.
Well here we are again, and this time things are looking a little bit different. For one, the Florida Panthers have clawed their way into the division throne, and have defended it successfully 51 games through the season. What’s more, the Capitals are sans two of their best three players, and despite a recurring need for center depth at the trade deadline in seasons past, the Capitals find themselves in the same exact predicament.
Except this time a new ingredient is added to the mix: not quite desperation, but certainly something cut from the same cloth.
And the Washington faithful are not reading this new story well.
Imagine a man in his mid 50s, still ridden with prepubescent-like acne, thick-lenses glasses sitting crookedly upon his fat face, a bowl of double-buttered popcorn in his lap, and a malnourished cat curled up on a poorly upholstered couch. He has just popped Return of the Jedi into his Blu Ray player, and is settling in to watch it for the approximately 3 billionth time. This man recites every line in unison with the movie, even adding inflection, accent, and minute facial expressions with his delivery. Now, imagine his surprise— then outrage— when Luke Skywalker fails to blow up the second Death Star’s main reactor core; the construction of the Death Star is then successfully completed, and Vader and Palpatine go ahead and vaporize Endor, sending furry bits of Ewok spiraling into galactic abyss.
A bowl of popcorn thrown at the television, trails of butter running down the screen, a screeching cat against a wall, a broken pair of bifocals.
Caps’ fans reactions to the team’s regular season struggles aren’t so far removed, as they witness the team take a path through the season which— by their own discerning— is incorrect.
Given the Capitals current standing, it is easy to understand disappointment, melancholy, even unbridled rage— such is the nature of being a sports fan. We all know it well. But to write a season off as lost before its most important stretch is played? Well that’s downright folly.
In the first post ever made on this blog, my co-founder made a statement which resonates today more than ever: “we’re not entitled to a Cup but we’re good enough to go get it.”
There are many elements to sports, to hockey: physical ability, intelligence, team chemistry, coaching, pure talent…but layered beneath it all is an element of luck, randomness. This is not to be ignored. When, only two years past, the Capitals dominated the regular season, leaving the ashes of previous offensive records in their wake, a Stanley Cup was not to be had. Nay, not even a second-round birth! The following year— a year during which a recommitment to defensive hockey was preached, and once more elicited a first seed— the Caps once more watched the Eastern Conference Finals from their couches. Those years, in their stead, the Capitals saw 7th and 8th seeded Montreal and Philadelphia duke it out for the chance to go the Cup. The next year, Tampa Bay— a team who Washington handled relatively easily during the regular season— fell in 7 games to the eventual Stanley Cup champions. All of this to say nothing of the 2009 Stanley Cup-winning Pittsburgh Penguins, who fired their coach in January of that season.
This is the first time many Caps fans are experiencing winter-adversary. Many fans ushered in by the Boudreau-Ovechkin era of success became zealots to the mantra “nothing matters until the playoffs.” While such a statement rides the line between truth and overstatement, it does possess a certain poignant undeniability to it— recent Caps’ postseason showings have made this painfully clear.
So while this season has thus far shown why such a sentiment is NOT faultless, now is as good a time as any to cling to it as an iron-clad truism. Caps’ fans should not boast to see the team’s future, to predict their imminent successes or failures. It is foolhardy and a road to “I-told-you-so’s” and red ears.
What they should do is keep the faith, knowing full well that the season still holds for the Caps 30 games, a trade deadline, and two of the team’s best players’ endeavors to return to the ice.
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Why would the Death Star try to blow up Endor? That was where the shield generator for the entire spacestation was located. In fact, they were trying to defend it from the Rebel Alliance.
Because, Tim, this is an alternative Star Wars where everything you know is wrong. Duh.