Hello NHL Playoff Purgatory
The Caps are hanging around, but I'm thinking of next season
It’s easy for me to forget sometimes that Off Wing Opinion got noticed the first time around because I wrote about the Washington Capitals, so I guess I’ve been remiss in not sharing my thoughts about the team over the last 10 days or so. When last I checked in, General Manager Brian MacLellan (GMBM) had just shipped Lars Eller to the Colorado Avalanche for a 2nd round draft pick in 2025 ahead of the March 3rd trade deadline. And while there were still a few expiring contracts left on the roster, GMBM stood pat as the deadline passed.
In the four games since my last look, the Caps have gone 2-1-1, taking five out of a possible eight points and managing to hang around the bottom of the playoff race in the Eastern Conference, five points behind the New York Islanders for the last Wild Card spot. The best news out of Washington over that stretch has been the play of Rasmus Sandin, a Swedish defenseman acquired from the Toronto Maple Leafs. Sandin has posted eight points in those four games, a real tonic when offensive production has come at a premium since the loss of power play stalwart John Carlson to injury. Flipping pending RFA Erik Gustafsson and a first round pick in this year’s draft for Sandin is looking good thus far, and promises to be even better if or when Carlson returns from taking a puck to the face.
Sandin’s promising start, along with the re-signings of Nick Jensen and Trevor vanRiemsdyk, have solidified the blue line for next season once you factor in the return of restricted free agents Martin Fehérváry and Alexander Alexeyev. With that out of the way, you’d figure GMBM would have to do some work on the forward lines. But when you take a closer look, you see a lot of familiar faces and not a lot of open slots on next year’s roster.
There are four pending UFA forwards in Conor Brown, Carl Hagelin, Conor Sheary and Craig Smith. Dylan Strome, Sonny Milano and Nicolas Aube-Kubel have earned cap friendly contract extensions. I doubt that Hagelin will be back. Craig Smith is a useful spare part, but I’m guessing he’ll depart too. I liked the deal to bring Conor Brown to D.C. last Summer, and I could see him returning for a full season after losing almost all of this past one to injury. Sheary could come back too.
What does that leave you with? Well, it looks a lot like this year’s team only a year older and just about as slow as before. The problem, as I stated back in February, is all the salary tied up in the team’s aging core. Nicklas Backstrom has been playing 3rd line minutes since his return from hip re-surfacing. $9.2 million is a lot to pay for a 3rd line center. Winger Anthony Mantha, who started off swiftly when he was acquired from Detroit at last year’s deadline, has looked like dead cap space at $5.7 million ever since. He’s paid more than invaluable power forward Tom Wilson. If there’s a way to unload that contract, I’m sure GMBM will pull the trigger.
And it’s impossible not to mention center Evgeny Kuznetsov’s. The 30-year old is the team’s top playmaker and is paid that way. Unfortunately, he’s not living up to that contract right now. Can he reverse the trend on the other side of 30? Don’t count him out, but we can’t count him in either at this point in his career.
There will be room to sign a name free agent of some sort in the offseason. But as my old friend John Keeley reminded me over the weekend, this team needs to add not just one, but at least two impact players on the forward lines in order to make the playoffs next year and provide Alex Ovechkin with the help he needs to catch Wayne Gretzky. There’s not really much room for error and Ovechkin’s shot at immortality — the prospect of which promises to keep fans headed to the arena as Stanley Cup hopes fade — hangs in the balance. GMBM has proven to be resourceful in the past, but this is going to be his greatest challenge.
I had my doubts about the World Baseball Classic when it debuted in 2006, but it has certainly grown on me over time. While I’ll always pull for Team USA, it’s hard not to love Team Italy managed by Hall of Fame catcher Mike Piazza (Mark DeRosa, manager of Team USA, is also of Italian descent). Thanks to some bizarre tie-breaking procedure, Team Italy and their Nespresso machine have advanced out of Pool A in Taiwan to reach the quarterfinals of the tournament. They’ll next play in Tokyo against the hometown Japanese on March 16 as the format moves to single elimination.
There’s a lot to love about Team Italy, though there are few actual Italian-born citizens on the team. Rather, like me, most of these paisans are among the 17.7 million Americans who are able to claim some sort of Italian descent. Such is also the case for Team Israel and Team Great Britain, also filled with lots of Americans. Essentially, anyone who could qualify for a nation’s passport is eligible to play.
The ride will likely end in Tokyo against a fearsome Japanese team that is one of the favorites to win it all. But it’s impossible not to feel happy for Piazza, who took his lumps in the recent past thanks to an ill-fated attempt to run an Italian soccer team, when all he did was run it into the ground. Buona fortuna to Mikey and the boys.
In between my birth and the arrival of my sister, my parents and I left Queens behind for a few months to live in lovely Bloomington, Minnesota. My father’s job decreed he needed some on site training, so off we went. The experience left my father with a healthy skepticism of the talents of then-Gov. Walter Mondale. My mother departed with a notebook full of addresses that dutifully received Christmas cards till sometime in the early 1980s. As for me, I was left with a soft spot for the Minnesota Vikings.
Though I can’t recall anything about Minnesota, I was only a few months old after all, I took the news that we were former residents of the Land of a Thousand Lakes as a cue to follow the team. As the Jets continually disappointed in the 1970s, following the Vikings in the newspaper every Monday morning during the NFL season provided a bit of relief.
Ever since, the “Vikes” have been my NFC backup team. Which means it was with more than a little sadness that I heard the news of the passing of former head coach Bud Grant at the incredible age of 95. His Vikings teams were chock-a-block with talented players like Joe Kapp, Fran Tarkenton, Chuck Foreman, Alan Page, Jim Marshall and Carl Eller. And of course, I can’t neglect to mention Ahmad Rashad, who was quite the wide receiver before he became Michael Jordan’s best friend.
Grant took the Vikings to four Super Bowls, losing all four rather convincingly. There shouldn’t be much shame in that. The four teams that defeated his Vikings in the BIG GAME, the Kansas City Chiefs, Miami Dolphins, Pittsburgh Steelers and Oakland Raiders were all incredible squads stocked with Hall of Fame level talents on the field and the sideline. That he made it to the Super Bowl four times in an era when he had to compete against the Dallas Cowboys and the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC could be considered accomplishment enough.
Reading all of the tributes, it seems clear Coach Grant was much loved. And while he never won the BIG GAME, he did have his day in Canton with many of the men he led on the field. It was an incredible life well lived. Bravo Zulu, Coach Grant. Fair winds and following seas.
Eric McErlain lives and works in the Washington, D.C. area. He blogged at Off Wing Opinion regularly from 2002-2009. In addition to writing at Off Wing, his work has appeared at The Sporting News, AOL FanHouse, NBC Sports.com, Deadspin, The Hockey Writers and Pro Football Weekly.