It is, somehow, Caps game day again. At 4 PM today, the Caps will play an exhibition game, their first real competition since March. In case your brain has been rendered perfectly smooth by the anxieties of a global pandemic, we have prepared this Professional-Quality Refresher Course. You are welcome.
By Peter Hassett 6 months ago
It’s been 338 days since the Pittsburgh Penguins bounced the Washington Capitals out of the 2015-16 playoffs. Tonight, it all starts again.
The Capitals could not be more prepared. They concluded the new season with the league’s best record for the second consecutive year. The Caps also led the NHL in wins (55), points (118), and goal differential (+81), winning 10 of their final 12 games. They landed the best player at the trade deadline: Kevin Shattenkirk.
In less than eight hours (or whenever you read this), Washington will face off against the Toronto Maple Leafs in the first round, trying to do the unthinkable: win the franchise’s first Stanley Cup.
Won’t you join us?
By Sean Morrow 4 years ago
The fine gentlemen at Toronto Maple Leafs Hot Stove have invited me to join them again. We’ll be getting you prepped for Sunday’s game between the Leafs and the Caps. I bet we’ll be talking Kuznetsov and Grabovski and stuff at some point. Tune in and enjoy. I promise I won’t look like an Oompa Loompa like last time.
(Hopefully Georgia won’t ruin it.)
By Peter Hassett 7 years ago
During the mess that was Monday’s brawl-filled Capitals-Bruins game, one play jumped out at me.
With the Caps on the powerplay, defenseman Connor Carrick got the puck. He was the lone guy on the point — with Mikhail Grabovski at his right and Troy Brouwer to his left. Bruins veteran Daniel Paille went after Carrick, thinking he could cause the youngster, playing one of the hardest positions in hockey– powerplay quarterback, to cough up the puck or surrender the blue line.
What would you expect from a 19-year-old on this play? Keeping the puck in the zone and dumping it in would be satisfactory, but that’s not what Carrick did. Instead, he faked an easy pass to Brouwer and then backhanded the puck to Grabovski. No one on the ice except Carrick seemed to expect that play. He kept the Bruins in their own end with a simple, smart pass– showing NHL-quality poise in the process.
By 7 years ago
If you were like me today, you spent your New Year’s the only way you know how, by watching hockey and drinking like you were 18 again. Yes, the NHL’s Third Annual Winter Classic was showcased today by our friends at NBC (we never forget Milbury), this time at Boston’s Legendary Fenway Park. The Philadelphia Flyers (and their fat and overweight dirty cheese-steak eating fans) made the trip up I-95 to play the Boston Bruins in a game for the ages that maybe had 8 good minutes of hockey.
What was the best part of the Winter Classic you ask? Well, beyond James Taylor’s stunning rendition of the National Anthem, it was definitely the debut of two commercials featuring prominent Capitals players. Mike Green made his acting debut and appeared in the Geico Commericial shown above (via gfcaps fan on japers), and Alex Ovechkin, Niklas Backstrom and cleverly edited extras wearing the #52 and #21 were in a Verizon Wireless Commercial shown here. Awesome.
I asked Peter, one of our lead writers, which commericial he liked best:
“The Washington Capitals’ invitation to the Winter Classic might have been lost in the mail, but the boys crashed it anyway. There’s the elegiac Verizon Wireless commercial that most everyone fawned over, but I really prefer Mike Green’s GEICO spot.
See, this commercial has everything I love. For starters, there’s Canada’s best defenseman, Mike Green. Plus those stupid cavemen get that institutional racism played out against them once more. Hijinx! Granted, I think GreenLife52 could benefit from a bit of the Stanislavsky method, but I still love this. NBC says we can’t be on a national hockey game? Listen up, Costas. Money talks.”
But see, I think he – like many other Capitals fans – were just wildly excited to see our players in commercials in general. And yeah, man. That’s sweet. I’m pumped too. We’re finally getting the recognition we deserve. But if you really watch the Geico Commercial and are looking at it from a fresh perspective, you notice that the Mike Green shown in this clip has about as much personality as a bag of potatoes. Okay, okay, I’m being too hard on him. He had as much personality as that creepy stack of money with the googley eyes.
Though, to be fair, his acting was 180 times better than whoever played the Geico Caveman.
But what do you guys think? Was Greener’s first commercial a huge success or a total letdown? Let us know and vote below:
