Where In The World Are The Caps?

A post over at Mirtle's site and a healthy dose of boredom have led to an evening of plotting Caps' players and prospects on Google Earth. While I'm new to the application, I think the results still turned out pretty well.

To begin with, I plotted the players to the city in which they were born, according to WashingtonCaps.com (where I also got most of the pictures, so thanks to them). I weighted the fonts for the players to indicate their likely level of hockey for this coming year (i.e. the NHLers have their names the largest, the taxi squad next and everyone else has the smallest font). Anyway, on to the pictures - as always, click on 'em to enlarge 'em.

First, the North American NHLers and 'tweeners (you can see pics of the other players, but need a closer-in screen cap to read their names - more on that later):No surprise that most of these guys live within about a Tiger Woods 3-wood of the border, and we all know how much GMGM loves his Western Canadian guys. Speaking of the Western Canadians, let's zoom in on that part of the country, shall we?Here, for the first time, we can see the AHLers and other prospects. Of the 11 players from Alberta and British Columbia, seven are blueliners. Interesting.

Swing back east and we see a bunch of Quebecers and Toronto-area guys, a handful of New Englanders and a couple of pockets of Midwesterners:No real surprises on this map, other than perhaps Donald Brashear being a Hoosier. Now to cross the pond...The Caps don't have too many Europeans at the NHL level (though the four very well could be the team's top four scorers this coming season), but they've got plenty of prospects, as the next two maps (of Eastern Europe and Scandanavia) show. By the way, Alexander Semin is from wa-a-ay the hell out there, isn't he?Finally, my favorite map of all, depicting the NHLer who has a continent to himself - Olie Kolzig:
So there you have it - a little globetrotting with the Caps courtesy of the fine folks at Google and Japers' Rink. Now if the team can just acquire this guy, I can add a new map next time 'round...