Pick 'Ems
Pick 'Em: Morrisonn or Jurcina?
by J.P. on Oct 30, 2009 2:00 PM EDT
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212 comments
"[W]e didn't want to carry eight defensemen again because it's too difficult for everyone to operate that way. It's hard for the head coach because you know you have someone sitting out, and someone is unhappy. And it's hard on the players." - George McPhee, 6/21/08
Despite the quote above (given in the wake of the Steve Eminger trade), the Caps currently find themselves with eight defensemen on their NHL roster. Has it been difficult to operate? It certainly seems as if the defense has performed better over the past couple of weeks due, in part, to a more or less static group of six defensemen and regular pairings, the result of John Erskine's injury and Tyler Sloan's scratches and fill-in duty up front.
If and when Erskine and a forward or two get healthy, the Caps will be back to a roster with eight active defensemen on it - not to mention salary cap concerns and a presumptively NHL-ready blueliner in Hershey - so one would think that McPhee will be looking to make a move.
Two potential candidates for such a move are Milan Jurcina (for and against whom extensive arguments were made this past summer) and Shaone Morrisonn. Their number so far this season:
Both players are set to become unrestricted free agents after this season, a campaign for which Morrisonn will make a not-insignificant $600,000 more than Jurcina.
If a rival general manager approached George McPhee with a palatable deal and told GMGM he'd take either one of the former Bruins to make it happen, whom would you rather the Caps hold on to? Does Mo's proven chemsitry with Mike Green come into play? What about Jurcina’s physical edge on a bluelinenot known for its hitting? And long-sleeved t-shirt or hoodie? Vote below on a question five-plus years in the making...
212 comments | 0 recs |
Pick 'Em: Quintin Laing or Tyler Sloan?
by David M. Getz on Oct 23, 2009 12:30 PM EDT
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160 comments
Despite the four day long respite the Capitals enjoyed earlier this week, the team appears to still be pretty banged up. Boyd Gordon's back is still "balky" (or "wonky", depending who you ask), as is Jose Theodore's, John Erskine's out of the lineup with a hand injury, and to top it all off Alexander Semin is day-to-day with a cold or flu bug. The good news is that help should be arriving shortly in the form of winger Tomas Fleischmann, who was cleared for contact on Tuesday and is eligible to return on Tuesday against the Flyers. The bad news, for at least one guy currently on the roster, is that unless something happens between now and Tuesday the team's going to have move someone in order to open up a roster spot for Fleischmann.
For the sake of argument, let's put aside the possibility of another Cap making a trip to IR or a last-minute trade going down and assume the team deals with this roster problem by moving one of their current players to Hershey. Odds are the guy who get's the short end of the stick on this one is either going to be Quintin Laing or Tyler Sloan. But which one will it be? And, perhaps more interestingly, which one should it be?
To kick the discussion off, let's take a look at each player's numbers with the Caps:
In short, the numbers say these guys are who we think they are: solid AHL players who can fill in adequately at the NHL level but probably aren't good enough to play a significant role on a good NHL team. Neither is particularly likely to be lost on waivers and neither is an integral enough part of the Capitals that the team is going to suffer greatly if they're lost, either to waivers or to the AHL.
That, however, is not to say that the two players are interchangeable. Sloan skates well, plays a position where depth is paramount, and can fill in on the wing. Laing brings something the Capitals lack (grit from a forward), can help in an area where the team could use some improvement (the penalty kill), and plays a position where the team isn't quite as deep. In addition, Laing's cap is $500,000, while Sloan's is $640,000 - a difference that's small, but not negligible. The choice on who to keep might not be clear, but it's no coin flip either.
160 comments | 0 recs |
Pick 'Em: Where to Play Eric Fehr
by David M. Getz on Oct 9, 2009 1:18 PM EDT
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99 comments
The salary cap is a wonderful thing for the NHL. It's brought parity to the game, turned the League into a more level playing field from a management standpoint, and helped secure the NHL's financial security. But sometimes it can sure be a pain in the ass.
That's been the case for the Capitals so far this season, cap restrictions playing a major role in the recall of Boyd Kane, the waiver-wire loss of Chris Bourque, and the team's decision to dress Tyler Sloan as a forward last night, effectively leaving the team with only eleven NHL-caliber forwards. Fortunately that problem looks like it's coming to an end: Eric Fehr is healthy and should be ready to play tomorrow night in Detroit (under unusual circumstances, no less).
Of course this puts this presents Bruce Boudreau and his staff with another problem, albeit a more pleasant one: What line does Eric Fehr play on?
The answer's not obvious. In fact, an argument can be made for just about any of the four. On the one hand, Fehr produced at an impressive level given the amount of ice time he saw last season. Here's how he stacked up among the fourteen forwards who played at least thirty games for the Caps last season (advanced statistics courtesy of Behind the Net):
| Goals/60 | 3rd |
| Points/60 | 4th |
| +/- | t - 3rd |
| +/- ON60 | 3rd |
| Penalties Draw/60 Min | 1st |
| Penalties Taken/ 60 Min | 6th |
| Corsi | 2nd |
| Quality of Competition | 3rd |
| Quality of Teammates | 9th |
In short, Fehr put up great numbers in almost every category despite playing against relatively strong opponents and with relatively weak teammates.
But the season's aggregate numbers don't tell the whole story. His production looks great, but most of it - 12 of his 25 points and seven of his 12 goals - came during one thirteen game stretch. It's true that it's hard to be consistent when you're seeing fourth line minutes and little powerplay time, but it's also true that Fehr's mid-season explosion means he wasn't doing a whole lot for much of the year. On top of his inconsistency Fehr, despite his size, is not a very physical player, something that works against his value when he's not scoring.
At the moment, Boudreau has Fehr on the team's third line, skating with David Steckel and Chris Clark. But it was your call, where would you slot Fehr? (And feel free to let us know with whom in the comments.)
99 comments | 0 recs |
Pick 'Em: Who Rides the Pine?
by Stephen Pepper on Sep 30, 2009 2:30 PM EDT
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As you know by now, GM George McPhee and Coach Bruce Boudreau, in their infinite wisdom and grace, have chosen to retain eight NHL-caliber defensemen on the active, 23-man roster, going into tomorrow evening's season opener in Boston: Mike Green, Tom Poti, Shaone Morrisonn, Milan Jurcina, Brian Pothier, Jeff Schultz, John Erskine, and Tyler Sloan. We don't mean to be flippant -- it's been a difficult decision for sure, with important, and unfortunate, salary cap and waiver wire implications.
That leaves, even with the possible game-to-game decision to dress seven blue liners, at least one healthy D-man in the press box per game. Remember the logjam that existed when Steve Eminger was here? It was nearly a nightly drama during the regular season as to which rear guards received a sweater, where Emmy was often a healthy scratch, and those lineup headaches continued into the post-season. Not an ideal situation in which the coaching staff finds itself, again, but, for now, a necessary one.
Losing a quality defenseman to waivers (to which all of the above would be subject) at this stage of the campaign would be considerably more damaging to a Stanley Cup hopeful than losing someone like Chris Bourque (painful though it may be, but we expect one of Tomas Fleischmann and Eric Fehr to return before too long). Both the Penguins and Red Wings utilized eight defensemen throughout the Stanley Cup playoffs last spring.
And we know that injuries happen: Just take a look at the Caps' nightly D corps throughout December of 2008; or revisit the historic injury woes of this season.
But who should sit most often during this embarrassment of healthy riches on defense? (Erskine-Pothier and Sloan-Schultz were your third and fourth pairings at practice this morning.) One would surmise dressing Erskine against "bruisier" teams like Boston and Toronto upcoming, and favoring Schultz, for example, against a squad with a dangerous power play. Overall, looking at performances on defense from this concluded pre-season and team needs, who should be the most frequent scratch this month?
66 comments | 0 recs |
Pick 'Em: Two Goalies for Opening Night
by J.P. on Sep 25, 2009 2:00 PM EDT
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119 comments
Through five preseason games, the Caps have allowed just a dozen goals and have a team goals against average of 2.37. That's the good news.
The bad news, perhaps, is that the team's number one goalie (nominally, at least) is 0-2 and has the worst numbers of the three netminders who have seen action so far this fall, and the best between-the-pipes performer has been the kid they're sending back to Hershey. Take a look:
Yes, this is an extremely small sample, and the teams against whom and behind whom these 'tenders have played thus far have been pretty varied. But one wonders just how much more Michal Neuvirth could be doing right now to make his case to start the season in D.C. That said, a veteran backstop is important to any serious Cup contender, and Varlamov has done nothing to lose the job that was presumed his at the start of camp.
With all of that in mind, if you were making the final cut, which two goalies would be on your opening night roster? If When George McPhee and Bruce Boudreau send Neuvirth back to Chocolatetown, will they have made the right choice?
119 comments | 0 recs |
Pick 'Em: Do the Caps Need an Enforcer?
by Stephen Pepper on Sep 4, 2009 1:45 PM EDT
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160 comments
Last season, fighting in hockey was the subject of national debate in Canada, from one of the Great White North's premier sports talk programs to the CBC's fifth estate production, "The Code." And more particularly, the role of the "enforcer" and the modern trend of the "staged fight," one that does not arise "out of the emotion, the spontaneity of the game, [or] a guy responding to a questionable hit on himself or on a teammate," but those "pre-arranged fights that don’t arise out of the play, [where] two heavyweights squar[e] off before a face-off, or text[ ] each other leading up to a game," as the former, recently-ousted NHLPA Director Paul Kelly once described.
Whether you, the fan, find those marquee bouts richly entertaining, or awkward and uncomfortable to watch, staged fights will undoubtedly remain in the game (with perhaps some tweaks to the rules, notwithstanding, down the road). But what of the "responding to a questionable hit" variety of fisticuffs? And whither your 2009-10 Washington Capitals' lack of a classic (well, in this current era, anyway) enforcer? Is one necessary to protect our elite, young and still-evolving corps of offensive talent from dirty hits and cheap shots? If so, at what price? Donald Brashear's $1.4 million per, or Colton Orr's $1 million per, for four years? Lappy's three year, $3.5 million pact?
John Erskine believes that each Cap, to a man, can and will stick up for each other, without a designated pile driver. Everyone's favorite cycler and re-cycler, Matt Bradley, added:
It doesn't matter to me if we have a tough guy or not; I play the same way no matter what. A lot of teams nowadays don't have a tough guy and it works to their advantage. Look at Detroit. They don't have any tough guys and they always seem to take advantage on the power play.
So I'm not really worried about that. For me personally, I'm more worried about contributing more offensively. In the playoffs there, I began to put some numbers on the board.
Yes, Brads, we fondly remember Game 5 of the Rangers series last April. Oh, baby. Having a player with some offensive and smooth-skating abilities, however modest, packaged in layers of heavy sandpaper, over a skater far more one-dimensional, provides a critical post-season advantage. And in our now legendary Pick 'Em file of "Brads or Brash?," Rink readers chose Matt.
So putting aside the issue of whether your entertainment value is diminished by the curtailment of the aforementioned pre-destined bouts between the "elite" pugilists, a debate over whether or not an enforcer is necessary for this incoming Caps team can, I think, be distilled to: is this squad, to a man, tough enough?
To say no is to suggest the need for an enforcer to pick up where those other individuals leave off (or never reach). But that's an imperfect solution. Better to have a whole line of gritty guys that have other useful tools in the box and that are, hopefully, less expensive. Don't we wish that just a few more of our forwards played with more Alex Ovechkin-like abandon?
To put it more poetically, how many on this team are certified bad-asses and how many are floaters? Can those in the former category keep the chippy play in check? Or, is having this self-described game-changing ability the critical post-season advantage?
We could compare post-lockout win-loss records and championships won to number of fighting majors earned by team, to assess whether having a top-end tough guy equates to more victories. But we've already seen in that time both the openly thuggish (Anaheim, 2006-07) and the no-nonsense, but breathtakingly crafty (Detroit, 2007-08) hoist la Coupe Stanley. We could also compare the number of majors earned by team to the number of instances in which an elite scorer on that team was dealt an injurious blow that forced him out of the lineup for a significant number of games. But we know quite well 'round here that correlation does not equal causation.
Let's look at the Caps' record from last year with and without Brashear in the lineup. In the regular season, the team went 37-21-5 with him dressed, and 13-3-3 without. In the playoffs? 3-1 with him and 4-6 without him. Significant?
It's impossible to predict whether or not having a goon in the lineup is going to deter a certain nasty hit or prevent an injury to a teammate. Or, more generally, quietly intimidate an opponent into defeat. It's got to be the whole machine, every cog, working together. (Not to mention staying in supreme physical condition to withstand some awkward crashes.)
But as Caps fans who have seen many a key stars-and-stripes contributor go down on account of an unsavory collision over the years, we wonder of today's collective D.C. toughness: Is it ever gonna be enough?
Happy Labor Day weekend, Caps fan brothers and sisters.
160 comments | 0 recs |
Pick 'Em: Caps Captain?
by Stephen Pepper on Aug 28, 2009 1:30 PM EDT
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424 comments
As training camp rapidly approaches (and thank the heavens for that fact), we thought it an appropriate time, on this Aloha Friday, to consider the possibility of a change in leadership. Perhaps, a lasting machine stitch of the "C" on a Washington Capitals sweater other than those worn by current captain, Chris Clark.
Notably, Patrick Marleau (historically a recent source of frustration for my fantasy teams) was stripped of his Sharks captaincy, and our Canes Country colleagues have pondered what may seem unthinkable to outsiders, relieving Rod-the-aging-Bod Brind'Amour of his position as team leader. If a captaincy change ought to be made, now seems the right time to implement it.
It was during 2005 training camp, following the lockout, that the team made a big to-do in announcing that the captaincy would be handed to Maryland native Jeff Halpern during a Fan Fest ceremony in Ballston. At the time, it seemed as if that captaincy would last for years to come. Unfortunately, Halpern's tenure was but one season, when Clark was named captain for the 2006 season, just a day before players were to report for September camp.
Back in late January, when Clark was shut down for the remainder of the season due to wrist surgery (the second straight season truncated by injury), all GM George McPhee would reveal about the effect of Clark's absence on the captain's position was that he and Coach Bruce Boudreau "would probably talk about it at a later point." Boudreau's view at the time, however, was clear: "Clark is our captain. There's no controversy there. When he gets healthy, he'll come back and be our captain." And so he did. Uncle Ted loves him. We see no indication that the team has since changed its course and will change its captain. But should they?
As I wrote in his Rink Wrap, Captain Cadaver certainly provides the younger players on this Caps team with an inspirational example of the rugged determination required to succeed in the NHL. But since his impressive 2006-07 campaign, he's been unable to consistently lead on the ice. And even Coach appeared to have called out El Capitan during a rough stretch of last season. More to the point, two of three Game 7 failures under his captain's watch resulted in defeat, the most recent of which was a stupendous collapse that still leaves much of Caps country scratching their heads. Ultimately, results matter.
But looking at the franchise's history of captains, we see quite clearly that the periods of greatest stability at the post, Rod Langway (1982-93) and Dale Hunter (1994-99), coincide with the greatest successes, both regular and post-season, of the franchise to date. Since the 1998-99, the team has seen six captaincy changes in nine seasons (including a "co-captaincy" of Steve Konowalchuk and Brendan Witt in 2001-02 and a switch to no captain under Glen Hanlon).
So with Clark still on the books for two more seasons and, we can only hope, healthy for the upcoming season, should McPhee and Boudreau stick with #17 at the helm, or is it time for the franchise to do what many believe must be its destiny: to officially designate Alex Ovechkin, the first repeat winner of the Hart Memorial Trophy in over a decade, as team captain? Or maybe even today's featured Cap, the pride of Wawota, SK?
424 comments | 3 recs |
Pick 'Em: Caps' Greatest Need?
by Stephen Pepper on Jun 30, 2009 1:31 PM EDT
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125 comments
We're on the eve of what will be a fun holiday for hockey fans, on both sides of the northern border, whether you call it Canada Day or Christmas in July. At high noon Eastern time tomorrow, general managers will step out of the saloons with guns blazing. And let us all hope that dreams of filling the Caps' greatest need, be it via a free agent signing or a trade, aren't shot down.
But what is the Caps' greatest need? Is it a hulking power forward to play right wing along side Nicky and Ovi, one who plays with a snarl, relentlessly bulldozing himself and the puck toward the net? Or a crafty second-line pivot, who can work efficiently with Alexander Semin and curb the latter's tendency to overplay the puck? Is it a physical defenseman most desired, that so many of us fans crave, to police the crease? Or, on that note, does the 2009-10 club need a respected enforcer to replace the unlikely-to-be-resigned Donald Brashear (and give Matt Bradley some cover)? Or discuss "other" needs in the comments.
Skip out of work early tomorrow, fire up a grill if you can, pour yourself a Canadian brew (Sleeman or Keith's, if you're lucky), and watch the drama unfold.
125 comments | 0 recs |
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Southeast Standings
| GP | W | L | OTL | PT | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Washington
|
16 | 9 | 3 | 4 | 22 |
|
Tampa Bay
|
14 | 5 | 4 | 5 | 15 |
|
Atlanta
|
12 | 6 | 5 | 1 | 13 |
|
Florida
|
14 | 5 | 8 | 1 | 11 |
|
Carolina
|
15 | 2 | 10 | 3 | 7 |
(updated 11.7.2009 at 9:10 AM EST)
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