Athletes protect the past. Those of us in the instant-reaction business too willingly spray “best” and “greatest” language onto events happening in front of us. Retired players serve as our foils, reminding us of previous teams that were better, and greater.
So before labeling this Caps team the best of the Alex Ovechkin era, let’s check in with some leaders of the 2009-10 outfit, which won Washington’s only Presidents’ Trophy while obliterating the franchise mark for points.
“Honestly, I think this team’s better,” said Matt Bradley, one of the stickiest glue guys from the 2010 team.
“This team looks even better,” agreed Mike Knuble, that team’s veteran soul. “This team looks even more impressive.”
Anaheim will make its annual appearance at Verizon Center Friday night, which means a visit from the man who jump-started Washington’s Rock the Red success and led the Caps to the top of the 2010 standings. Bruce Boudreau has been monitoring Washington’s relentless march through the league; the Caps are 16 points ahead of their nearest competitor in the Eastern Conference, having suffered through exactly one losing streak, an interminable two-game skid. (The second loss came in a shootout.) Boudreau sees the same thing we’ve all seen: a team with “tons of confidence” that seems to discover a different way to win each night, whose flaws are harder to locate than a salt truck on 66.
“As you would probably think, I watch a lot of their games,” Boudreau told the Orange County Register this week. “What people don’t realize is how fast they are. But they’re also big. They’ve got the combination of speed and size, and they can play any way you want to play.”
[Another Snowvechkin? For the Caps, eerie parallels to 2010]
Boudreau’s Washington teams sometimes have been derided for their weak divisional competition or lack of playoff success, but there was greatness here in 2010. Those Caps won 14 straight games, one of the five best runs in league history. They scored 318 goals, an absurd 46 goals clear of the next-best team. They had the league’s best goal differential and the league’s best power play, and they clinched the league’s best record with four games to play while running away with the division.
But that team also attracted noisy critics throughout its onslaught, traditionalists who thought the explosive offense would shoot duds in the postseason, and that Washington’s success was too one-dimensional.
“Back in the day, around the league they might have thought, ‘Yeah, they’ll be good in the regular season, but we have our doubts in the playoffs,’ and obviously that kind of came true,” Knuble said this week. “This team I feel is a little more mature, a little more playoff-ready. More people think they’re the real deal than they thought of us back in the day.”
Some of this might be unfair. That 2010 team led Montreal three games to one in the first round of the playoffs before Jaroslav Halak etched his name into the brain stems of every Washington sports fan. The Caps unleashed 134 shots over the final three games of that series; Halak stopped 131 of them. It’s hard to turn those three games into a referendum on Washington’s approach.
“I’m not saying that was the reason why the season didn’t progress like we expected it to, but that was a big part of it,” said Bradley, who works for the Caps as a pro scout in Ottawa. “Not making excuses, but we did get a little unlucky to run into a guy who was the best he was in his whole career during that series.”
Still, even without the playoffs, there’s a sense — both here and around the league — that this Caps team simply does more things better than its 2010 predecessor. Boudreau’s teams were always searching for a second-line center. This team has budding star Evgeny Kuznetsov, now fourth in the NHL in points. That team had three goalies: one on the back end of his career (Jose Theodore) and two more who had never played a full season as a starter. This team turns almost every night to Braden Holtby, a zen 26-year-old who was named to his first all-star game and is a favorite to claim the Vezina Trophy. (“As good as anybody in the world right now,” Boudreau said of Holtby.)
That team had one of the worst penalty kills in the league. This team has one of the best. That team scored goals with almost casual ease, but was unremarkable at preventing them. This team is first in the league in both goals per game and goals against.
“They play, I think, tighter defensively, so it’s not as much back-and-forth,” Vancouver center Henrik Sedin said last week. “They used to be flashy; they used to be that kind of a team. But now they’re deeper. Now they can bring in [veterans T.J. Oshie and Justin Williams] and put them on this team. I mean, that’s dangerous. And they’ve got a good D group and their goalie’s been great, so there’s not a lot of weaknesses.”
Perhaps most importantly, that 2010 team was led by brilliant youth and a coach in just his second full NHL season. This team’s leaders are almost all in their primes.
“I don’t know if it’s a very fair comparison, because I think the core group, they were kids when Bruce was dealing with them in 2010,” Knuble said. “I think Bruce really had to live with a lot of mistakes, because he knew they were coming up, and they kind of had to learn on the fly and learn on the go. It’s tough for a coach when you have to live with the mistakes in the major leagues. That’s why they create the minors, where guys can make mistakes without it being out in front of everyone. In the NHL, they can pick at your warts. … I think those guys have matured. They’ve learned how to be great all-around players.”
[Alzner, Niskanen have forged a bond on and off the ice]
And so this isn’t a knock on Washington’s former coach. Knuble, who works as a part-time coach with the Grand Rapids Griffins, said he often refers to things he learned from Boudreau, calling him “a hell of a hockey coach.” Bradley said he never second-guesses Boudreau, “a great coach” who “took us to the next level.”
This team, though, has so much texture, so many layers of quality: three or even four dangerous lines, a sturdy defense, a grizzled coaching staff, players who have won Stanley Cups and a once-in-a-generation star with an additional six years of wisdom.
“He was great then, and he’s great now,” Bradley said of Alex Ovechkin. “To me, he’s the best in the world. But experience is a good thing, and he definitely has a lot of experience now. He’s leading [them], and at the top of his game.”
The result? Washington’s 2010 team had the most points through 46 games in Caps history. This team flew past their mark by 11 points.
“I mean, that’s not even close,” Knuble said. “Winning’s about timing. You need some older guys, you need some younger guys and you need a ton of guys in their prime, and that seems to be right where Washington is.”
Six players remain from the Presidents’ Trophy winning-roster. Four of them — Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom, John Carlson and Karl Alzner — were under 25 that year. A fifth, Brooks Laich, told the Junkies this week that “this is undoubtedly the best team that I’ve been on.”
That leaves Jason Chimera, the one veteran holdover, enjoying a career season at age 36. Knuble recently telephoned his longtime friend to ask if this current team is as impressive as it’s looked.
“You’ve been around the league,” Knuble said. “Are you good? Are you really good?”
The answer didn’t take long.
“Yeah,” Chimera answered. “We’re legit.”
