Kudos to the Capitals for not panicking. Yes, their recent playoff failures have been disappointing and disheartening. But with today’s announcement that Brooks Laich won’t be leaving via free agency, instead signing a 6-year, $27 million deal, the Capitals made a statement that they still believe in the nucleus of this club. And make no mistake about it, Laich is not just a phenomenal player, but also one of the “glue” guys in that locker room. If it weren’t for hockey’s fascination with giving the captain’s “C” and the alternate “A” out to the best players, almost regardless of leadership ability, then Laich would certainly have an “A” on his chest (I mean, seriously, I think Nick Backstrom is a tremendous hockey player, but is he really the guy who is going to pick everyone up in the locker room when things are going bad? He couldn’t even dig himself out of that awful rut against the Lightning. Is it so wrong for someone to just be a good player, and not have to have this burden of leadership shoved on them? I understand Ovechkin, because your best player HAS to be your leader. But your second and third best players? I’m not so sure).
Now I understand that this is just the first move of the offseason. They could certainly go out and trade Alex Semin and maybe others. But I’m glad they realized that there is a certain core group of players that HAVE to be kept around. And I think Laich certainly qualifies for that group. How many players in the league have the all-around skill-set that Laich has? He isn’t just a top-six forward, but he also is a regular contributor on the power play and penalty kill units.
I think it’s clear that the Capitals management believes in what they’ve built. They know they have a good, but flawed, group of players right now. Maybe they are banking on the last few top prospects in the system (players like Dmitri Orlov, Cody Eakin, Evgeny Kuznetsov) being the last little nudge to complete this team. Maybe McPhee really believes that all the Capitals needed to beat the Lightning was a puck-moving defenseman (since Mike Green, Tom Poti and Dennis Wideman all were either out or missed time during that series). Maybe McPhee believes they just need a little bit of veteran grit (i.e. Troy Brouwer, although at age 25, I’m not sure whether he can qualify for “grizzled vet” status yet). But I think it’s clear that he isn’t going to blow up everything that he has built since the lockout. Caps management has put up with a couple awful seasons after the lockout, and then the well-documented playoff failures. For better or worse, I think they have hitched their wagon to this core group of players and they’re only going to go as far as that group of players wants to go. If they were going to blow up the team and try a new avenue for success, I think Boudreau would have been fired within a week after they were bounced from the playoffs. But that’s not this management team’s style. And in a couple years, I bet we will be thankful for their patience in not mortgaging this team’s bright future for a sideways step in the present.
Nats Notes
How does this team keep winning? Somehow the Nats won the finale of their series with the White Sox, after being pretty much blanked for most of the game. Then one swing of the bat from Danny Espinosa, who quietly has become a top-three candidate for the N.L. Rookie of the Year (he would be the leader if it weren’t for the batting average he is currently sporting, which I realize is a misleading stat, but hey, voters are stupid), and the Nats find themselves in the driver’s seat. A clean outing from the bullpen, and the Nats take two out of three in Chicago.
Then we turn to last night against the Angels, when it looked like the script was going to repeat itself. The Nats battled to stay in the game all night long (how John Lannan made it past the third inning last night is beyond me), and after wiggling their way out of jam after jam, a clutch home run from Espinosa tied up the game. Unfortunately, the magic ran out in the 10th, when Sean Burnett looked like the Sean Burnett from the beginning of the year. Look, teams can’t win consistently with as little offense as the Nats have had. Sure, you can go on a run like the Nats have, but it’s going to catch up to you after a while. If only, we had another big bat in the lineup, like someone we had spent $128 million on. Oh wait…
(By the way, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention how sweet that 5-4-3 double play was in last night’s game. Zimmerman made a great diving snag on a hotshot to his left. But with Zimmerman we almost take this for granted. The more impressive part for me was Espinosa making a sweet turn and strong throw with a runner barreling down on him, and Michael Morse making a difficult pick at first base. It’s really amazing how good defensively Morse has been at first. I think you could easily make the argument that he has become a league-average or maybe even above-average defensive first baseman. And considering he is doing all of this on the fly, while carrying the Nationals offense for the better part of a month, well I think the man deserves some credit. The more I think about it, the more I think that Morse ends up as the Nationals all-star this year. Tyler Clippard has been great, but set-up men just don’t make the all-star game. Life’s just not fair.)
Wizards clarification
In my last post, I mentioned how I wasn’t enamored with the Vesely pick, in part because of the failures of Oleksiy Pecherov. However, I want to emphasize the “in part” part. My general feeling of angst over this pick goes back more to the history of failed European big men in the NBA, not necessarily the one that the Wizards had. Think about successful Euros in the league. For every Dirk, there are ten Nikoloz Tskitishvilis. Name me the last successful Euro big man. Gallinari? Bargnani? Both are talented, but clearly flawed, players. All-stars? No way. So maybe if we have those expectations then I’m okay with that pick. I guess I just would have rather had a flawed player with good defense (Kawhi Leonard), then a flawed player whose strength is running and dunking (Vesely). But hey, I hope he proves me wrong.
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