capcrunch98

I feel like the Norris trophy hasn't gone to the best "defensive" defenseman since Langway won it almost 40 years ago.

JC is one of my favorite Caps ever, and as nice of a guy off the ice as you'll ever meet. But there's no question Josi (and Hedman) are better all-around defenseman. My only issue with Carlson not getting it is what you alluded to - some years it seems like points alone can win the award as long as the guy isn't an absolute disaster in his own end (like honestly, I completely understood why Mike Green never won it). In fact, the guy who announced the award last night - Paul Coffey - won it 3 times solely based on offense. There's just no consistency to the award at all.

Yes it was, but he paid a hefty price for it with the suspension and the scarlet letter he wore the rest of his career. Ironically it worked out okay for the Isles as they managed to beat a stacked Pens team in the next round, which nobody expected them to do, and prevented the Pens from a 3-peat and they never won the Cup again during the Mario era. Not making excuses for the hit at all, but I can understand the frustration over losing that series. 1993 was a rough year - they were coming off a season before where they looked great and a lot of guys had career years and then they blew a 3-1 series lead to the Penguins, they had given away Dino Ciccarelli in the offseason for a bag of pucks in another Abe Pollin salary dump, and Rod Langway retired in the 1993 season. For me personally, and other Caps fans I knew, yet another first round exit to an Isles team we should've beaten really drove home the point that what was left of the core from those late-80s/early-90s teams (Hunter, Miller, Hatcher, Pivonka, Ridley) was never going to do jacksh**t in the playoffs. I've always believed that Dale was thinking something similar when he skated behind Turgeon after he scored the insurance goal which put the nail in the coffin of yet another lost Caps season.

Butch Cassidy won Coach of the Year. If you would've predicted this to any Caps fan 17 years ago you would've been cut off at the bar and laughed out the door. Guy was absolutely incompetent behind the bench when he was here, and apparently in the locker room too. Good for him.

2/3 of the way through the season, and we're way ahead of Boston and only 2 behind the Yankees. Don't think any of us saw that coming.

Moreso than the '98 Caps? 😂

Has anyone been following Dylan Bundy this year? The guy has totally turned a corner and looks nothing like the pitcher who was seemingly giving up 8 HRs per game during his time with the O's. I'm happy for him, but it's frustrating to see yet another pitcher find his stuff after leaving Baltimore, especially a guy drafted as high as Bundy was. Is it just a change of scenery? Better health? Has he changed his techniques?

We're still talking about this?!?! 🤮

The Os kept us entertained by playing .500 ball for over a third of the season, and most importantly a lot of the young guys are making huge strides. Throw in the fact that the Red Sox and Nats suck big gigantic elephant balls, and this hasn't been a terrible season for me considering the low expectations I had. They're reverting to the team we thought they'd be, and should finish low enough for a top-5 pick. I am fine with that.

Beautiful. I can't hate the Isles. They deserved to beat us with the effort they put in, and they've been a joke of a franchise for a big chunk of the past 30 years - not much of a threat to us or anyone else really except themselves with some of the dumbest personnel move I've ever seen. The Flyers, on the other hand, are complete a-holes, and their fans are even worse. It's been over 40 years since they've won the Cup, and I'll root for anyone who can help keep that streak going.

Bruce is a great guy and what he did with the team when he took over in 2008 was amazing and kicked off the Rock the Red era. But taking a team that has a history of grossly underachieving in the playoffs and putting it in the hands of.... a guy who has a history of grossly underachieving in the playoffs? GMBM would really be sticking his neck out on that one. I agree with you that he's better suited for a younger team with low expectations.

Every fan is entitled to their opinion, and it's nice to hear silver linings the day after a very pitiful elimination. But this club gets no pass from me. The 2018 Cup win made me think this team knew how to match another team's intensity, was willing to do whatever it takes to win, and above all finally stop taking periods - and sometimes entire games - off like they had been doing for the previous decade. For 9 weeks in 2018, they did all this, unfortunately it seemed to stop there and it's becoming clear that this current club has it's best days behind it. Winning the Cup is so hard and depends on a lot of intangibles, but for a group this talented to not even make it out of the first round for 2 years in a row, and only advance past the 2nd round ONCE over the 13 year Rock the Red era, is completely unacceptable.

Backstrom admits in post-game press conference that the Isles were hungrier and wanted it more. A lot of people made this observation about the Canes when they bounced us last year (which is why I brought it up earlier today). I know none of us wanna hear this, but when that happens to a veteran team that just won the Cup 2 years ago, it goes beyond the bottom-pairing d-men and the 3rd and 4th lines and even the coach. It's an issue with the core of the team.

Agreed. He's been the worst bring-in-a-fading-star-for-one-last-chance-at-the-Cup experiment since Mike Richards. I really thought playing with Ovi and other fellow Russians would elevate his game to a Fedorov-like level. Not even close.

Yes, because no other team has to deal with injuries to top players during the playoffs. Oshie got hurt at the tail end of Game 4, just as the Caps were coughing up the series lead including a lifeless stomping in Game 3 which let Carolina back in the series. Nicky has been out vs. Isles since Game 1; I guess we now have an excuse for why the Caps didn't show up the first 3 games last week.

And sorry to dredge this up, but we should've taken out the Canes in 5 games last year. I called it a choke job when the Caps, as defending champs, blew a 2-0 series lead and 2-goal Game 7 lead at home to a young team with journeymen goalies whose best player was knocked out of the series, and a number of posters on here who were probably still on a high from the Cup win the year prior took me to task for it. Again, it's ridiculous how many Cups this team has left on the table over the past 12 years.

Nope, postseason stats are separate. I think Joe B and Locker mentioned that with his goals last night Ovi is now 20th all-time postseason goals.

I've cried through every Caps playoff heartbreak, dating back to the 80s, and it would really be poetic if they became one of the few teams in league history to climb out of the deepest hole imaginable. But it's not happening in this series, and we all know it. Realistically, the best case scenario is we win another and then go down fighting in Game 6. That could convince management and ownership this team still has something special and the core should be kept together, with some changes to the bottom half of the roster and behind the bench. Because after Game 3, I was thinking of something drastic - as in trade everyone over the age of 25 not named Ovechkin and hope you can pull off a 2 year rebuild like the Rangers are doing.

In terms of pure disappointment, the 2010 loss to Montreal does take the cake. As you mentioned, we were stacked that season, blowing through everyone. I probably ate 300 free wings at Glory Days Grille that year because they seemingly won every home game and scored 5 or more goals doing it (hence the promo kicking in). Longtime Caps fans had never seen anything like it. Watching the Caps that year, with a core of young studs who weren't even in their primes yet, we all were thinking of an Edmonton Oilers-type dynasty. Me and my buddies who had followed the Caps forever all altered our spring and early summer plans that year around the thought that we were going to playoff games into June. And then we blew a 3-1 lead in the first round to a team that didn't even qualify for the playoffs until the last day of the regular season. Brutal. But for me, this loss to the Isles is the biggest collapse. Unlike 2010, I wasn't expecting them to win the Cup this year. But also unlike 2010, we can't point to just one or two things (a hot goalie, unlucky bounces). And we can't take solace in the fact that we're a young team that will only get better. We're a veteran club with guys who just won it all 2 years ago (and hence should know what it takes to win in the playoffs) and yet we're just getting our butts handed to us shift after shift and unbelievably still taking entire periods off. Barring major changes behind the bench AND on the bench, it will be the same thing next season and the season after, and in that regard this feels like the end of an era.

Agreed. I'd give anything to go back and watch one more live game with Peter Bondra or Mike Gartner or even Dino Ciccarelli, and those guys weren't half the player Ovi is. We can talk all we want, but we have no idea how much we're going to miss #8 when he's not around.

Hersh I have a lot of respect for you as a poster, I've been reading all of your opinions in the Caps and Orioles threads for years. But with the talent the Caps have, and just 2 years removed from a Cup, for them to lay down and die like this, with zero fight at all, to me that's the definition of a collapse.

Sorry to pull out the eulogy talk while we're still "technically" alive, but just wondering where people would rank this collapse among the many of the current Rock the Red era (since 2008). I think this is Number 1. The first round meltdown vs. Montreal in 2010 and the sweep vs. Tampa in 2011 were bad, as was the gutless first round loss to the Rangers in 2013. But in the aftermath of those, we could still take solace in the thought that better days were ahead, as the Young Guns were still relatively young, and maybe an extra piece or two was all we needed. The losses to the Pens could be easier justified because in each case we lost to the eventual Cup champ. Even last years loss to Carolina was easier to stomach because of the Cup win the year before, and the argument that we ran out of gas because we had been playing so much hockey. But this inevitable loss to the Isles feels so different. It exposed us as an old, slow team with no fight, no plan, and no clue. It almost feels like the end of an era.

The saddest part is this team has definitely left some Cups on the table over the past 12 years. I know winning the Cup is so hard and depends on so many intangibles and a bit of luck, but there's no excuse for a team with this much core talent since 2008 to have only advanced past the 2nd round of the playoffs once. We still have the best goal scorer in hockey, a Norris trophy caliber d-man, a blue chip prospect in goal, and a lot of frontline talent, so the window isn't closed yet. But it's getting there. I guess a silver lining is this makes us appreciate 2018 that much more.

Just the last 2 years? Oh man, I still have nightmares about those a-hole Philly teams from 30 years ago, and even worse were their subhuman fans who they let out of the zoo and bussed down to the Capital Centre. Some of those scumbags made Cowboys fans look like Mister Rogers.

With the Caps pretty much on life support right now, Boston losing Rask, the Pens gone, and the jury still out on whether Tampa can rise up in the playoffs, I have a really bad feeling Philly might break through this year.