1. The George McPhee Era in Washington, at least insofar as it overlapped with The Alex Ovechkin Era in Washington, was characterized by a lot of regular-season winning and a lot of postseason disappointing. Critical to the latter point, it often seemed, was McPhee’s inability to adequately address the team’s depth down the middle behind all-everything center Nicklas Backstrom. Sure, there were a couple of years of an old-but-effective Sergei Fedorov, and Mike Ribeiro had his serviceable moments. But there were also the Brendan Morrison, Eric Belanger, Brooks-Laich-as-2C, maybe-Eric-Fehr-can-play-center, let’s-give-away-Matthieu-Perreault, and so on years.
Then along came Evgeny Kuznetsov.
And then along came Lars Eller.
The trio has provided the Caps with the kind of pivot play that wins championships, and this year they might do just that. Consider this, from Vogs:
For those of you that struggle with math, that’s 4.5 points per game from Caps centers to 1.5 for Knights middle men in this series. And it hasn’t just been this series, either.
Against Columbus, the Caps’ four centers rang up nine goals and 12 assists, while Jackets centers finished with five goals and four helpers. Against Pittsburgh (whose center depth has been the envy of the League for years), Caps centers had five goals (including one pretty memorable one) and another dozen assists and the Pens’ pivots had four goals and eight assists. And against Tampa, the Capital quartet notched eight goals and 14 assists, while Bolts centers had nine goals and five assists. Add it all up and, through 23 games, Caps centers have 25 goals and 53 assists (an average of 19.5 points per center), opposing centers have 19 goals and 22 assists (10.25 point per pivot). [Note: those stats are just cumulative totals for the teams’ top-four centers and don’t account for fill-ins in games missed by Backstrom, Beagle, Alex Wenneberg and Evgeni Malkin, and not all power plays feature two centers like the Caps’ extra-man unit does. So it’s pretty rough. But you get the point.]
Granted, some of these teams have pretty prolific wingers (like Artemi Panarin, Nikita Kucherov and Jon Marchessault), but so do the Caps. Point being, the Caps have been getting great play from their centers… the kind of pivot play that wins championships.
2. One of those middle-men – Evgeny Kuznetsov – is at the center (no pun intended) of everyone’s favorite debate these days: who gets the Conn Smythe as playoff MVP? (By way of background, we tackled the question before the Final started.) With the ginormous caveat that the Caps haven’t won anything yet…
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So who ya got? I agree – don’t even talk about it until… you know. Because as one of the candidates put it best…
3. We’d be remiss if we didn’t include some exterior crowd shots from Monday night, so here we go…
Much more here:
That, my friends, is as genuine as it gets. Or at least as genuine as it has gotten so far.
Indeed.