Today was the shortest and therefore worst day of the year, but this will not be a gloomy story. After a few years in the wilderness, the Caps are back and actually good. They’re on pace to record about 25 more points this season than last, and there’s lots to love about them.
So I’m in a good mood, and I want to share it with you. What follows are my favorite things of the year.
Favorite Caps player
I didn’t have to think about this very long. Connor McMichael by a mile. I’m a sucker for a pollyanna who proves the haters wrong. (We’ll be talking about haters a lot in this story, but if you already know who I’m talking about, you’ll enjoy this.) I’ve spent the last three years tracking McMichael’s journey from the doghouse to the top of the Capitals leaderboard, and to that point he is on a pace that would double his goal total from last season. Two years removed from a six-game season, he’s doing this:
That’s a triumph. It’s easy to love this player, and I do.
Favorite game
First of all: the tail end of 2023-24 is automatically eliminated from consideration. That version of this team is not worth discussing, let alone appreciating. We have to go with the peak of Ovechkin’s charmed autumn: the night he stomped the Vegas Golden Knights.
Alex Ovechkin’s hat trick helps Caps beat Golden Knights 5-2
That was the night Ovechkin scored three goals for the first time in nearly two years, in the process adding Ilya “Don’t Sleep” Samsonov to The List. Ovechkin would get two more goals the next day before his big injury. It’s hard in hockey to imagine a more drastic and sudden fall from such a great height. The drama!
Also, I also believe that was the first night Joe Beninati put his blue glasses into regular rotation. This is important to me, history’s foremost Joe Beninati fashion archivist.
Runner-up: The night the Caps put a million goals on Jordan Binnington.
Favorite non-Caps player
I’m sure this is tiring for people familiar with my New Jersey Devils fixation. I’m sorry; it’s Jesper Bratt. Bratt, 26, is better than a point-per-game player despite a slow, penalty-pocked start. He should hit a career-high in goals this year even if his shooting percentage regresses.
In November he scored his first career hat trick.
But I think passing is Bratt’s strong suit. He could be one of the league’s best passers right now, serving up five for Jack Hughes and three more for Nico Hischier (not bad on-ice partners, I admit).
Like the Caps, the Devils are on a major upswing in 2024-25, on track to improve last season’s points total by more than 20. Bratt is a big part of that improvement, and I hope the Caps obliterate him in the playoffs.
Favorite Caps play
Last year, my fave was the time Charlie Lindgren tried to make a save with his bare hand, one of the single dumbest things I saw last year and I’m including the Borderlands movie in that calculation. Lindgren almost got a repeat appearance with his windmill save on Friday night, but here’s a different take:
It’s Alex Ovechkin scoring on the rush after Dylan Strome made a perfect zone entry and Aliaksei Protas made a perfect pass, allowing a perfect wrist shot. A perfect play on its own, but with greater implications. When I saw this, I knew that Ovi finally had the support he needed to do the thing. (You know the thing.) Ovechkin always had a shot, but he hadn’t been great on the rush in a long time. I love Dylan Strome, my fave Caps player of 2023, but I had doubted that he was an ideal partner for Ovechkin. I was wrong. I love when I’m wrong about this stuff.
That goal came less than a month into the season, and it signaled to me that we were about to watch something special. I think in a little over a week we’ll see that specialness again.
Favorite RMNB story
There’s a bunch of ways I could have come at this, and while I might be letting recency bias make the call: It’s our continuing team coverage of the New York Rangers sucking. It’s petty, sure, but isn’t that the heart of sports? It’s delighting in the suffering of another division team, it’s the fall from grace of a not-so-beloved ex-coach, and it’s a team blowing up their whole long-term vision because Tom Wilson made them big mad one time.
It started innocently, with Dylan McIlrath beating AHL call-up Matt Rempe in a fight and Ovechkin putting two on Shesterkin. Within a month of disappointing play, the Rangers let it be known they were ready to deal Jacob Trouba and Chris Kreider. Absolutely no one wanted Trouba, who I have to emphasize was their captain, so they played hardball: healthy-scratching him and threatening to waive him before finally making a stop-loss deal with Anaheim.
Meanwhile, Rempe returned to the big club and immediately leveled a bad hit. A lone happy story (for right now, let’s check again in 2032) was them re-signing goalie Igor Shesterkin to a record-breaking contract. But the afterglow lasted just one week, then they got blown out by LA and were ready to “consider all options.” That’s when head coach Peter Laviolette started healthy-scratching Kaapo Kakko, one of the rare Rangers not on a down season. Kakko was not quiet about the injustice.
“I know you’ve got to do something as a coach when you’re losing games,” Kakko said, “but I think it’s just easy to pick a young guy and boot him out.”
That quote was more than GM Chris Drury could bear; he sent Kakko to Seattle the same day.
Then Matt Rempe again returned to the big club and again immediately leveled a bad hit. He’s gonna get suspended.
Me, Ian, and Chris are on this beat together, and we’re having a blast. I guess this wasn’t a story so much as a full storyline, and I guess it’s a bad look to be this horned up for schadenfreude, but it’s been a hard year. We find joy where we can.
Let’s do non-hockey stuff real quick.
Favorite music
It was a great year for music, especially of the girlie pop variety. I loved “Please Please Please” by Sabrina Carpenter and “Pink Pony Club” by Chappell Roan. Charli XCX’s whole album was a banger, but I am going in a slightly different direction for my favorite full-length.
Absolute Elsewhere by Blood Incantation. It’s a progressive death metal opus. There are two songs. They are both 20 minutes long. It’s brilliant.
My favorite single of 2024 was “The Future is a Foreign Land” by Ghost.
A rare Ghost song not about Satan, this one is from the fictional 1969 version of the band, who were imagining the future 55 years from then (i.e. now), and how the “dark fascist regime might be gone” in 2024. If not, then “I’ll hold you close for the minute it takes” for it to all burn down. Let us pray for more in 2025.
Favorite TV show
Sorry to be a normie, but it’s Shogun. I thought there were going to be more decapitations and slightly less seppuku, but for me the irresistible detail was the doomed romance between Mariko and the Anjin.
They were more horned up for each other than I was for the New York Rangers, who probably should nominate their own second right now, if you know what I mean.
Favorite book
I read exactly zero new books in 2024. My bad. Instead I did the whole mainline The Chronicles of the Black Company series by Glen Cook, and I re-started the Discworld series by Terry Prachett.
On the nonfiction front I read Vincent Bevin’s 2020 book, The Jakarta Method, a history of America’s foreign policy killing lots and lots of poor people in Asia and South America, and how no one talks about it. I like to believe that if we all agreed that America’s conduct overseas is bad, that’d be a good starting point for bringing together Americans who think they have nothing in common.
Favorite movie
Challengers.
I didn’t expect to enjoy this so much, though knowing Trent and Atticus did the score should have been a hint. It’s a love triangle about tennis players. It’s funny and understated – but only until the tennis is happening, then it gets frenetic and hyperreal. I cannot remember a movie ending I’ve loved more than then ending to Challengers. I won’t spoil it here except to say that you can’t really know Tashi’s character until the final frame.
Favorite video game
I didn’t even play it that much – it was mostly Aileen on the sticks – but I was transfixed by Animal Well. It’s a metroidvania where every screen is packed with secrets, all lovingly crafted by a single person doing all the developing, writing, music, and design. Spooky and cute and intricate.
I also had a fun time playing Helldivers 2 with the #crashers. We will protect Managed Democracy again soon. During the offseason I played AAA games of yore I had never played before: all the Uncharted games plus Red Dead Redemption 2. My favorite character was Tacitus Kilgore.
On a closing note, recall with me that the Capitals at the end of 2023 ranked 29th in goals-for percentage during five-on-five, getting outscored 69 (boo) to 55. Now, at the end of 2024, the Capitals rank second, behind just LA, outscoring opponents 83 (most in the league) to 59. It’s been a good year – in that sense at least.
Your turn. What did you love about 2024?
- players
- games
- storylines
- music
- movies
- video games
- whatever else
