[Miss Part I? Click here.]

What kind of job does a suddenly blind-in-the-middle-of-his-life man perform? For two years Collin McKinney didn’t see anything at all. Eventually, he could see out of his left eye an area “about the size of a 50-cent piece.” His medical remedies more or less exhausted, McKinney contacted the Virginia Department of the Blind and Visually Impaired. The work options offered him there — “moving paperclips” was how he described the meager administrative listings — were a poor fit for his broad and varied educational background and work experience.

But back in his Fairfax neighborhood, McKinney had developed an affinity for taking care of dogs belonging to his neighbors. He’d walk them during business hours, care for them during neighbors’ vacations. He developed a reputation for being something of a “dog whisperer,” effectively training unruly canine rascals on his block. Dogs and a blind man, working well together. Who knew?

Post- NHL lockout, and now fairly a fixture at Caps’ games, McKinney was enjoying himself and the friends he was making from the experience. Except for one set of fans: Buffalo’s.

“Buffalo fans are the worst,” McKinney told me. “They actually stole my blind stick one time from me at a game.”

Now you’re certainly reacting as I did as those words arrived on my ear — Buffalo Sabres’ fans . . . did . . . what?

It was two seasons ago, during the final game of the 2006-07 campaign, at Verizon Center, the one that was sold out, lamentably largely due to wave after wave of belligerent Buffaloan.

“Thank God I could see a little bit, because they decided to play keep away with my stick, and I managed to grab it back, which surprised them, I think,” McKinney related. “I couldn’t believe people would do that. They were so obnoxious and so foul-mouthed.”

As shocking as this story is, having been in Verizon Center that day (Washington’s hockey bloggers hosted an end-of-season party at the Chinatown Clyde’s after the game), I look back and think that something like this monstrosity was entirely plausible amid so large an ornery and inebriated set of visiting fans. Not all Buffalo fans in Verizon Center behaved badly that day, of course, but a striking and surly subset most certainly did.

“Collin,” I told my dinner partner, “there really was something about that day that was distinctive in a very bad way. A lot of people had a bad experience that day, although what you describe is off the charts — sub-human, really. Our team was lousy, theirs was in first [place], and the scene was just unruly and altogether unpleasant.”

Wanted: One Hockey-Loving Ocularist

In early 2008, as Collin McKinney grappled with the reality of having his right eye removed and replaced with a prosthetic, his “twisted” sense of humor set upon a novel idea. He was fitted with a standard prosthetic eye, but he again wanted to summon his passion for hockey to help alleviate his trauma. He had been in contact with an area ocularist to try and get the Capitals’ logo etched on a second prosthetic eye. In other words, when you looked Collin McKinney in his replacement eye, he wanted you to see his passion. But first he needed the team’s permission.

“I have a twisted sense of humor,” he told me. “If something horrible like this is going to happen to you, you better have a sense of humor about it at some point, because if you can’t laugh, you end up sitting around doing nothing, wasting away.”

“I just thought it would be funny and cool, ‘cause it kinda shows what I’m into.

“I don’t get tattoos,” he added with a laugh.

McKinney wrote Capitals’ owner Ted Leonsis, seeking permission to use the team’s trademarked logo on a prosthetic eye. He sent the owner his request in a letter. And the owner replied.

“‘Wow,’ I think was his very first reaction,” McKinney noted. “‘You really want to do this?’”

“I think he thought I was a kook at first,” McKinney said with a laugh.

The request, McKinney pointed out, required more than just the owner’s blessing — that of lawyers, as you might imagine. Capitals’ attorneys were consulted, but also ones from the NHL’s league offices. Ultimately, McKinney got the team’s permission, and that of the league. He also received an invitation from Leonsis to take in a game in the owner’s box, where he could model his passion-prosthetic.

Now comes the hard part. The personalized prosthetic comes with a $3,000 sticker price. McKinney, an early recipient of Social Security due to his disability, subsists on $12,000 annually and some additional, modest money from helping out his Fairfax neighbors by walking their dogs and performing odd jobs.

“There’s no way I can afford that,” McKinney noted. “But now I know that there’s an ocularist in town who’ll do it. That’s what is important to me. If he had turned me down I had already Googled the entire country for others [ocularists]. I’d have contacted every one of them. It’s not something I’m going to give up on.”

At this point I wanted to reach into my back pocket, pull out my fraying black leather wallet, open it and turn it upside down and empty out all of its contents in this cause. Problem there is that that wouldn’t have purchased McKinney a temporary tattoo.

“Things are thrown your way in life,” Collin McKinney told me over our final sips of Monday night beer. “You just have to find a way to move on.

“This idea I have for ultimately winning over  . . .  getting the better of, my misfortune, it’ll happen one day. I believe that.”

In my nearly 35 years as a Caps’ fan I thought I had terrific reason on top of terrific reason to support this city’s pro hockey team, and to champion its cause. Over the years it had hockey heroes — Rod Langway, Dale Hunter, Olie Kolzig, Peter Bondra, now Alexander Ovechkin — wear its sweater. It had endured, in searing and endearing fashion, a brush with death, a thrilling run to a Stanley Cup finals, a sale to a hockey-town-constructing-committed owner. And the drafting of a franchise-altering and anchoring talent. But in September 2008 I found the best possible reason yet to be a Caps’ fan: Collin McKinney wears our team’s colors, and life can’t attack his hockey heart. There’s a life-long, no-trade clause in Collin McKinney’s allegiance to the Caps. He belongs to us.

The Washington Capitals announced that Karl Alzner and Chris Bourque have been assigned to the Hershey Bears. Quintin Laing was placed on waivers and, if cleared, will report to Hershey.

[Part I of II ]

In the moments leading up to my meeting Collin McKinney, 42, of Fairfax, I readied myself for a seriously sad encounter. There are newsworthy triumphs and tragedies in life every day, and all I knew of McKinney was that he was a huge hockey fan and that he’d endured a sudden and unimaginably tragic misfortune a few years back. This was to be a happy hour meeting devoid of the happy, I imagined. But adversity, I learned over the course of two hours in McKinney’s company, even of the most shocking and harrowing kind, can summon untapped resolve and renewed purpose within the afflicted. In Collin McKinney I found the story of a man who endured one of life’s most savage blows, turned to hockey as a comfort on his road to healing, and emerged an inspiration to his Northern Virginia community.

Life in general didn’t deal McKinney, an Arlington native, much of a strong hand to begin with, health-wise. He’s diabetic, and he battles thyroid and heart problems. He also has severe arthritis.

“I have a lot of bills and pills,” he told me with a chuckle.

When I met McKinney in Ballston on a recent Monday night he stood at the very entrance of our restaurant waiting for me, wearing his Alexander Ovechkin Caps’ jersey so that I could easily identify him. I noticed the black sweater enveloping his frail, 150-pound, world-weary frame, and a blind stick in one hand.

Over our first beer he shared with me the tale of his very first Caps’ game, back in 1986. Somebody had given him tickets at work. Collin took his brother to the game.

“I had a blast, and I was hooked,” he told me.

His attendance at Caps’ games in the immediate years that followed was sporadic; working a handful of modest jobs in offices and maintenance, he attended as often as he could on a modest salary. But one visit to the old Capital Centre that featured a Peter Bondra hat trick upped the ante. He became a puckhead of the first order. Today his home is a shrine to all things Capitals — he has three sweaters, signed hats, “every ‘Rock the Red’ towel ever handed out” he noted with pride, and scores of signed player cards and photos. He owns a Caps’ Tiffany glass lamp, a Capitals’ rug, a big wall hanging of Alexander Ovechkin. “T-shirts like you wouldn’t believe,” he emphasized. I asked him how many games he attended during last season’s stirring run to the Southeast division title. “I think pretty much every one,” he told me. McKinney’s email prefix starts out “bonzai.”

“I just love the Caps, I just love hockey,” he told me. “I used to be a giant Redskins’ fan, but that’s taken a back seat to hockey.”

A Life Forever Changed

On May 10, 2001, McKinney, then working his way through more school with three jobs, was in a hallway at his job at Neiman Marcus. He dropped a paper, bent down to retrieve it, and met a brutal fate.

“There was a guy doing trash, and he had a whole bunch of folded over cardboard boxes,” McKinney began. “He came up as I was going down . . . and he caught me across the bridge of the nose.

“Both of my retinas detached.”

In an instant Collin McKinney’s world went black.

“I dropped a piece of paper and my life changed forever,” he said.

He went immediately to an ophthalmologist. “‘You need surgery and you need it now,’ he told me,” McKinney related.

His left eye was operated on first, as it was believed to be the more seriously damaged. That surgery proved moderately successful, and today McKinney has, in conditions of bright light, a tiny bit of vision out of it. But during surgery on his right eye McKinney woke up out of the anesthesia, bringing the procedure to an immediate halt. In the delay between his second surgery on the eye, damaged nerves failed to regenerate. His right eye began to die.

Thirty-plus years of battling diabetes greatly complicated both the surgeries and the recovery.

“Diabetes, what it does, it produces very weak blood vessels in the back of the retina, so they had to go in and laser them, and that’s what caused me, ultimately . . . to lose everything,” he explained.

“What made me blind is my eye would hemorrhage, the blood vessels would burst and my eye would fill up with blood and I couldn’t see through it. I could see for like a week and then all of a sudden I’d have one of these hemorrhages and I’d be blind for four or five months.”

McKinney endured this fluctuation between partial vision and total blindness for fully two years. His right eye literally bled to death. Then it started shrinking.

“Once is started shrinking, it started pressing against the optic nerve, and this went on for five years, and the pain started getting so intense that I had to go on some pretty heavy painkillers,” McKinney told me.

“I don’t know about you,” he added, “but I don’t do drugs very well. It was a pretty ugly time.”

“It was highly depressing,” he said, with obvious understatement. “It got to the point where [the eye] just had to go. That was this past June.

“I finally just said, ‘Look man, it’s gotta go, it’s either that or I gotta go.’ I just couldn’t go on [in that pain].”

McKinney and I were seated in a booth in a chain restaurant surprisingly crowded on a Monday night. As I listened to him detail his tragedy I worried about him getting emotional and overcome with his story’s sadness, but it was apparent early on that I was in the presence of a young man of exceptional fortitude and perseverance. He relayed his circumstances to me without the slightest semblance of self-pity. He’d had seven years to live with his misfortune, and in his narrative there was no account of buckling under the woe.

McKinney went through more surgical procedures and specialist visits than he can tabulate. Neiman Marcus kept him insured for a solid year while he was out of work and receiving treatment initially, but McKinney’s pre-existing conditions transformed a bad accident into a malevolent mishap — one he was left to grapple with with only the support of friends and family.

“It was quite a life-changing event,” he said. “I was scared. I didn’t know to operate as a blind person. To learn all that I had to in mid- life, was . . . a weird stream.”

“I couldn’t take care of myself — I couldn’t see. I couldn’t check my blood sugar levels.”

Fortunately, McKinney has family in Northern Virginia. His father passed years ago, and he moved in with his mother, today his principal caregiver.

“I couldn’t get through my daily existence without her,” he said. “I had to go to a lot of doctors. She got me through all these different surgeries. She knew what I needed.

“Thank God she was there.”

Determined to try and establish some normalcy in his life, McKinney enrolled in Northern Virginia Community College, in some computer training programs. Computer programming, he explained, is a relatively common pursuit by the vision-impaired. But programming he found boring. Next he tried business classes, but the further he went along with those the more he realized how limited he was by virtue of being unable to work in common business software.

McKinney had a friend whose father went blind, and their intervention helped him in his early struggles.

“I was lucky I got a really good teacher who taught me how to get around with a [blind] stick, how to get on Metro.”

He spent “seven or eight” months departing his house only for followup surgeries and doctors’ visits, and another four months after that “just sitting around.”

“I was sitting there in my house trying to figure out what to do with myself.”

‘I See Ghosts on the Ice’

One day a friend suggested to McKinney that they go downtown together and take in some hockey. It was just a street hockey event outside the Verizon Center, but McKinney found himself getting reacquainted with an old friend — the game he loved. Next he would get rides out to Caps’ practices at Piney Orchard and strike up conversations with the players after practices. McKinney has been able to forge relationships with various Caps’ players over the years. Whenever Nicklas Backstrom sees him he offers McKinney a high five.

“Olie [Kolzig] was always extremely nice to me,” McKinney noted. “I used to go up to Piney Orchard, and all the players were nice enough to sign stuff, but at one point Olie saw me and actually got out of his truck and found me — I guess he saw my blind stick — and stopped and talked to me for a little while. I thought, ‘That’s an awesome guy.’”

Then, at a friend’s urging, McKinney agreed to try and attend a Caps’ game.

“It’s still a little scary trying to get through the crowd in front of Verizon Center,” McKinney noted. “I may as well have a target on my back.”

Inside Verizon Center McKinney isn’t known by many except in his section as “the blind guy,” but he does have important help. Season ticket holders “Bonnie and Mike” sit immediately behind McKinney and make sure he gets everything he needs, and that unsuspecting, newcomer fans in the section don’t infringe on his experience.

“I turned around to high-five them one night and we’ve been fast friends ever since. They really watch out for me,” he told me.

He gets regular help from the arena portal attendants, ‘special’ care from some arena bartenders who pour his drinks, he explained with a broad smile, even aural guidance from an otherwise silent Slapshot.

McKinney of course can’t follow the action on the ice as do the rest of Verizon Center’s patrons. When the Caps wore black sweaters he could make them out a bit with his left eye. Now, he’s only able to tell when a goal has been scored by the flashing red goal light, and the euphoric eruption that follows.

“I basically see ghosts on the ice — ghost figures moving back and forth.”

“Red ghosts, I hope,” I offered.

“Yes,” he replied, smiling.

“I feel like the team helped me out a lot. A lot. They are so nice to me. All the players, all the staff in Verizon Center.”

“All I care about is hockey,” he said.

Today McKinney has a passion for sharing his passion for hockey in his neighborhood.

“I want to get the neighborhood kids into it. They’re going to be fans after we’re done. So I get kids who are six and ten and twelve in my neighborhood to come over and watch Caps’ games, and I take them to games.”

Hockey, the game McKinney fell in love with at first sight, pulled him up out of his darkness by virtue of the people in it, its atmosphere, and the challenge of passing along his passion for puck to his community’s youth.

Coming Tuesday in Part II: Collin McKinney’s remarkable request of the Washington Capitals

[Admin edit: There was a problem with the web site that did not allow for the full rendering of the page. The comment section should now be available.]

From Friday’s victory over Philadelphia, a few photos with my new camera. We start with 1 Capital scoring, 1 assisting, and 2 former Caps (Metropolit 13 & Eminger 26) with front-row views of the goal.

Backstrom Scores, Ovechkin Assists - 10/3/2008

Then there’s Washington’s netminder Jose Theodore after a Flyer shot knocked off his mask.

Theodore Unmasked

The Rarely-seen Dave Steckel Faceoff Loss

Sound Positioning by Morrisonn and Alzner

Have a Seat, Mr. Richards... No, We Insist

All photos by Mike Rucki, ©2008 On Frozen Blog

Thank you, Garrett, for uploading Coach Boudreau’s latest classic moment for all to see, and to Capitals Kremlin for posting about it in the wee hours of the morning! Definitely a fun thing to watch with one’s Sunday morning coffee.

For the first time in team history, the annual Season Ticketholder “Meet the Caps” event was held at an amusement park: Six Flags America. To say it was a success is an understatement; as one who has attended the past ten years’ events at the Verizon Center — and seen those events gradually shift from fun little gatherings to long-lined exercises in boredom as the season ticketholder base has increased — moving to a venue with other forms of amusement was indeed a big improvement.

The event started at 6:30 p.m. for fans, though the players got run of the park before the fans. In fact, for those wondering why Sergei Fedorov was a little late for his scheduled autograph session: he lost his cell phone while riding the Batwing roller coaster. Normally a hero’s helper, today Batman’s ride turned villain and snatched Fedorov’s phone mid-flight; apparently, though, his phone was recovered, so Truth and Justice (and good fortune) prevailed.

A mohawked, Weagle-painted fan

The Caps-fan-only event this night was in the park’s Gotham section; rides included the roller coasters Batwing, Superman: Ride of Steel (yes, I know Supes patrolled Metropolis not Gotham, but it’s a cool ride so no complaints), and The Joker’s Jinx. Autograph stations were positioned throughout the area; lines for most players, barring Ovechkin’s of course, were more reasonable than last year’s despite the increase in season ticketholders. That may be partly due to the weeknight Maryland location (it took over an hour for us to get there from downtown DC). But having activities for all ages, instead of exclusively child-focused as in years past, provided more to do than simply waiting in line for an autograph and contributed to reduced lines. Not to worry, parents: the kid-friendly fun of years’ past was still abundant, including SlapShot antics, balloon animals, hockey-themed games, and face painting.

The ride queues were as fast-moving as the coasters themselves — at one point my wife and I simply sat on the Superman coaster and rode it again immediately since no one was waiting in our row. I don’t know about you, but I can’t remember the last time I was able to ride a roller coaster twice in a row without waiting in line again. Lines were practically non-existent unless you insisted on the first or last car . . . and even then the wait was perhaps two or three trips deep. Just a bit different than the typical 60-minute wait on a sweltering summer Saturday.

After the autograph sessions, the players, all still clad in their Capitals sweaters, spread throughout the park for some more fun before being hustled back to the team buses. For instance, a group of players including Mike Green went by practically at a jog — not to avoid autograph-seeking fans (though there were a few trailing behind), but to ensure they had time for the 200-foot plunge to earth on Superman: Ride of Steel. Others hit the carnival fairway to try their hand at the games, like Karl Alzner and Tom Poti tossing handfuls of rings, the circumference of which looked slightly smaller than that of the targeted bottles; and Nicklas Backstrom, Michael Nylander, and Jose Theodore attempting to win a few stuffed animals (photos below — though none top this brilliant shot provided by the team).

As my wife and I were leaving the park around 9:00 p.m., we heard an announcement over the park-wide speaker system: “Will all Capitals players please proceed to the buses immediately. Thank you.” Hopefully the team (and fans) got their fill of roller coaster thrills and enjoyed the evening — we certainly did.

Backstrom for the Win!

Karl Alzner & Tom Poti at the Ring Toss

Theodore seems to be operating outside the trapezoid

Step Right Up and Win a Stuffed SlapShot!

Backstrom Poses while Theodore Throws

If you have the NHL Network, you’re about to see A LOT more live hockey games.  Via Kukla’s Korner:

With more live game coverage than ever before, NHL Network today unveiled its U.S. broadcast schedule for the 2008-09 regular season. It includes 75 regular-season games, all in HD.

Highlighting the schedule is the inclusion of CBC’s award-winning Hockey Night In Canada, now available to U.S. fans through NHL Network for the first time. Every Saturday night, NHL Network will not only broadcast the live Hockey Night In Canada double-header, but also the CBC pre-game show Scotiabank Hockey Tonight and post-game show After Hours.

Additional highlights for the 2008-09 NHL broadcast schedule include:

• Live NHL games every Saturday night throughout the season
• 26 double-headers and 1 triple-header
• 17 Wednesday-night games featuring TSN’s broadcast of Wednesday Night Hockey

Though not called out by name, you have to think that the triple-header is CBC’s Hockey Day in Canada.

If you haven’t picked up that HD flat-screen yet, may we suggest a shopping trip this weekend?

Check out Kukla’s Korner for more information, including the full schedule.

Thanks to Capitals Director for Media Relations Nate Ewell for passing on a great photograph from the season ticket holder’s party.

Photo courtesy of the Washington Capitals.

I had never heard of Les Dales Hawerchuk before Chanuck sent me a link. They’re a band out of Montreal, and while the lyrics (in English subtitles) are NSFW, the tune is a catchy one. If I could speak French, I’d be singing this one all day.

A brand new colleague in my office, Victoria, not yet six weeks in her new gig, hails from Gulfport, Mississippi. She’s a young twenty-something, bright and engaging, and while college on the West Coast and two brief employment stints in D.C. have well dulled her Mississippi drawl, it’s still abundantly clear that she’s a seriously southern girl. We’re happy to have her. Like others her age, Victoria enjoys meeting friends after work for cheap beers at happy hour. As you might imagine, her family, most of whom still reside in Mississippi, has zero connection to the sport of hockey. Victoria has a boyfriend named John who hails from Oregon and who works for the Department of Energy, and Victoria has reported to me that he has no interest in hockey whatsoever. All of this made what the two of them did on Thursday rather startling to me.

I pass Victoria’s work station each morning en route to my office. Thursday morning near 9:00 I was startled to see on her computer screen the Washington Capitals’ web site. She was perusing it. Naturally, I asked her why.

“I didn’t make it to a single game last year,” she told me. “I don’t want that to happen again this year.” Victoria the Delta darling was searching the Caps’ site for hockey tickets for her and her boyfriend.

Turns out, Victoria had been to a Caps’ hockey game before, in 2006, during her first-ever visit to Washington. It made an impression.

“It was fast-paced, high energy, and I loved the way the crowd got into it,” she told me.

“I got the bug I think,” she added.

A bug for hockey!, said the Dixie doll. 

Now Victoria’s ticket search became my search on her behalf. Prior to her lone NHL game two seasons back, Victoria had attended a Mississippi Sea Wolves hockey game as a young teenager back home. The Wolves, of the East Coast Hockey League, were once coached by Bruce Boudreau. Fate, I thought.

“That was the first I’d ever seen an ice rink,” she noted with a smile. But it was her experience years later in a big-league rink in the big city that made the lasting impression.

I asked Victoria why she hadn’t made an appearance at a Caps’ game last season, when they’d become so hot a story in town.

“I changed jobs within DOE last year, changed offices, and I was just so busy with all the changes.”

I never push hockey as a cultural experience among my co-workers, but if they stop by my office and ask questions about the sport, I answer, in generous, often gratuitous detail. I’ll give them two-and-a-half hours of my time, if I’m busy, and discuss my game-playing scars, my fake teeth, ‘Slapshot’ and Killer Kaminski. Last season a nuclear engineer from London from our third floor, a very slight former rugby player named Adrian, stopped by my office the morning after watching Alexander Ovechkin for the first time on television.

“You can’t take your eyes off him,” he explained, highly animated, his eyes wide and arms gesturing wildly. “We’d have loved to have had him on our pitch!”

I guided Victoria to the Caps’ ‘Six-Pack’ plans. They seemed budget friendly to a young professional couple. We perused all of the plan options, comparing the ratio of weeknight to weekend games. We decided that the ‘Original Six’ slate was the most appealing, offering as it does both next Saturday’s home opener against the ‘Hawks (sold out) and that snazzy late January Saturday matinee against the Wings.

“Are the Wings good?” Victoria asked me, reminding me, forcefully, of her regional naivete.

She still had to sell the investment to John, but first I wanted to make sure that she could still land that Six Pack, cause I knew tickets were flying fast. I told Victoria to find seats first and make the selljob to John second.

My suspicions were well founded. A Caps’ sales rep informed my Project Puck Convert of that plan’s unavailability. Victoria, I could tell, was close to crestfallen. Now this really became my mission.

“Let me reach out to a friend,” I told her. “No promises, but let me see what I can do.”

Actually, before I could have a phone chat with a Kettler Capitals friend that same sales rep pinged Victoria with the idea of going to the Original Six set but sitting in different seats for the games. Perfect.

“I’ll go with you if John won’t,” I assured.

Victoria’s boyfriend actually put up no resistance at all. In fact, Victoria reported his being excited by the investment.

“He’s excited because I’m excited,” she said.

“Last year, I saw everyone on Metro dressed in their red sweatshirts and their red jerseys,” she explained. “Sometimes, I couldn’t even get on the trains they were so crowded.

“I wanted to be one of them.”

She is.

The flattering forecasts are coming in fast and furious. The Caps are a consensus selection to win the Southeast division for a second consecutive season, but additionally, they’re commonly identified either explicitly as a Stanley Cup contender or a “dark horse” one. To quote the good living theme from the movie ‘Things to To in Denver When You’re Dead,’ these are “boat drinks” days in hockey D.C.  This is rarefied air we’re breathing. But why? I think it’s worth reflecting on the factors that lead to such conventional preseason prognosticating.

Start at the top, with Head Coach Bruce Boudreau. His Jack Adams standing is impressive and nice, but what’s more salient to 2008-09 is his having guided a core group, now in D.C., that bought into what he was selling in Hershey in 2005-06, which culminated with a Calder Cup, and then, replacing Glen Hanlon in season last season, he got even more guys (NHL ones) — not least among them Hall of Fame lock and then rental player Sergei Fedorov — to buy in again, and go from worst to first in a historic regular season campaign. Gabby brought to Washington a championship pedigree, winning hockey titles on two different professional levels, and his 60-game results in the NHL last season were nothing short of startling. His is a stock you buy.

Stanley Cup hockey teams generally aren’t dominated by the heroic efforts of a lone standout talent. Think the Detroit Red Wings. The New Jersey Devils. The Edmonton Oilers. The Colorado Avalanche. The Anaheim Ducks. But in Alexander Ovechkin the Capitals seem to possess something markedly larger than just a heavy hardware hauler and a fun talent to behold. He competitiveness is as impressive as his talent, and he has very publicly stated that his hockey mission in life is to win a Cup and make Washington a hockey town. The early trajectory of his career invites comparisons especially with say Mario Lemieux’s in Pittsburgh: an afterthought franchise lifted up quite high by a sublime talent. Additionally, Ovechkin is that rare superstar who melds marvelously with all of his lesser heralded teammates. Heck, he melds well with no-name prospects at Rookie Camp. He is the face of the Capitals due not just to his standing as the planet’s greatest talent but because his teammates believe him to be. He loves leading them into battle, and they love being led by him.

If there was a commonly recognized weakness heading into 2007-08 on the Caps, it was the seeming absence of a true no. 1 blueliner, a guy who could ably and productively QB a power play and bring some firepower from the back end at even strength. Out of nowhere emerged Mike Green. He led NHL defensemen in goals scored last season. He possesses a breathtaking and dynamic skill set — and he’s just 23. If you read Corey Masisak’s feature on Green yesterday, you learned that no less than the father of Paul Coffey sees striking similarities in Green’s game to that of his son.

“Green is an atypical offensive defenseman,” Masisak wrote. “He enjoys carrying the puck, which often leads to exhilarating rushes from one end of the ice to the other. His stick-handling and creativity rivals that of Alex Ovechkin and Alexander Semin, while his vision and passing ability is equivalent of a playmaking pivot like Nicklas Backstrom.”

A team like Carolina proves that you don’t necessarily have to have a no. 1 blueline stud to win a Cup, but the vast majority of champions do. The Caps have theirs.

Another key ingredient is an elite playmaker for both the no. 1 line and the top unit power play. Nicklas Backstrom is that. Swedish hockey media years ago identified Backstrom as an heir apparent to Peter Forsberg. That may have been an unfair comparison, but in his rookie season in ‘08-09 Backstrom made a magnificent, Calder finalist transition to star center status in North America. His stock, too, is one you buy.

The center position on the Caps was one thought to be improved but still a work in progress this time a year ago. This season a healthy Michael Nylander — the team’s top scorer in the preseason — will in all likelihood center the team’s third line. The Caps will skate three productive lines this season, and that helps out a bit in the playoffs.

In the cumulative, all of these factors are significant and indicative perhaps of a good-bet-for-the-playoffs kind of club. But if I had to point to a catalyst cause for all the truly heady predictions it’d be to the perception that the Capitals’ well drafted and assembled core of young talent, which certainly includes the likes of Alexander Semin, Brooks Laich, Shaone Morrisonn, Jeff Schultz, Boyd Gordon, and Tomas Fleischmann, is collectively skating impressively now but also with their best NHL days still ahead of them. It’s a 95-to-100-pt. club on paper in the early October moment, absent the achievement of any notable production improvement among all the skilled youth. Who believes they’ve all plateaued?

Ultimately, a Stanley Cup caliber team is forged by distinctive chemistry, and this, too, is a calling card of these Caps. Something obviously special took hold in that room last spring. And it’s basically all back, ripening.

What if the sports team you loved was owned by any of these vets?

OnTap Magazine, “the Washington, DC, metro area’s magazine for music, entertainment, nightlife and culture,” features Alexander Ovechkin as its October cover boy. ‘Face of the Franchise’ is how Ovi is identified on the cover, and ‘Superstar Alexander Ovechkin Makes Hockey A Must See in D.C.’ follows as tagline.

There’s nothing particularly news-breaking in the brief feature, but as a cover story, intruding on Burgundy and Gold season, it’s telling of hockey’s ascent in the region. Robert Fulton’s piece does conclude with some amusing options for spending $124 million:

• “248,000,000 glasses of Miller High Life at 5 p.m. on Saturday at Asylum in Adams Morgan.”
• “659,574 premium single game Caps tickets ($188 per)”
• “354 three-acre islands off the coast of Florida ($350,100 listing on eBay).”

Washington Capitals defensemen Mike Green and Shaone Morrisonn will be at Baltimore’s ESPNZone on Wednesday, October 1, from 2-3 PM. They’ll be signing autographs and answering questions, so Caps fans in Ballmer may want to take a late lunch break to stop by.

Update: Per the team, Mike Green will be on Fox 1370 Sports Radio in Baltimore at 3:25 p.m.

Chris Bourque, Mathieu Perreault, and John Carlson all enjoyed standout training camps with the Washington Capitals this month. Bourque is still enjoying his. To slightly varying degrees, all three enjoyed prodigy player status early on in their hockey careers. On a hunch, I checked their respective birth dates. All three share the birth month of January. What’s the importance of that in a hockey player’s development? To listen to the view of one of hockey’s most learned and thoughtful commentators on the matter, it’s just about everything.

Hall of Fame netminder and celebrated author Ken Dryden, in his superb overview of hockey’s hold in his homeland, Home Game, notes that in Canada, a hockey player’s birthday is virtually determinative of his development:

“The [development] system rewards those parents who are able to time a pregnancy to begin in the spring and come to its happy fruition in the early months of the new year. Hockey registration, you see, goes by the calendar year, and each child born in a given year is considered the same age for purposes of setting age limits. Yet a child born, say, on Wayne Gretzky’s birthday of January 26 is likely to be a better player on the first day of hockey tryouts than a player born on December 25 of the same year. The January child is almost a year older, a year stronger and more mature. At age six or seven this represents an enormous advantage, the January child being nearly one-sixth or one-seventh older . . .

“The older child has the best chance to be the first star of the game, to develop a star’s skills and attitude and expectations of success. The younger child — smaller, weaker — must first learn to cope and later, when the age difference matters less (for example, at fourteen the same January child is only one-fourteenth older), he is often unable to undo his and others’ expectations, reprogram himself, put to one side his coping skills for a star’s skills, and become a star. The same situation and problem exists, of course, in the schools.

“If streaming came at a later age, the effect of birthdates would be largely outgrown. But streaming comes early in hockey.”

And, Dryden claims, streaming in hockey is destiny.

“From age nine onward,” he writes, “better players get streamed into competitive teams, and the competitive teams get the better coaches and more ice time . . . the gap between the mediocre nine-year-old and the gifted nine-year-old begins to widen, and widen fast. In Canadian minor hockey in the late 1980s, if you don’t make it by age nine, you likely won’t make it at all.”

Not quite Darwinian, is it? Or is it? At this point, you’re probably wondering, do Canadian (and Minnesotan) (and Scandinavian) families actually so family plan? Were the question put to Dryden, I’m rather sure he’d answer, “Not if, but in what volume?”

Next I decided to check birthdays for some high profile hockey stars — specifically, those residing in the 500 NHL goals scored club. The results were startling. Limiting my search just to those who’ve scored 500 goals and were born in January and February, these names loom large: Gretz; Bobby Hull; Phil Esposito; Mike Bossy; Mark Messier; Frank Mahovlich; Peter Bondra; Brendan Shanahan; Jeremy Roenick; Lanny McDonald; Joey Mullen; Dino Ciccarelli; Jaromir Jagr.

Blackhawks’ coach Denis Savard hovers just a bit outside of 500 goals scored in his career, but he was born in February. Were I to have broadened my search to include births in the first quarter of the calendar year, the list would have expanded appreciably — Gordie Howe, for instance, was born in the first week of March in 1928.

Now, you don’t want to get carried away with the intriguing pattern of hockey family planning, because in truth studs and stars are born in all 12 months of the calendar. Alexander Ovechkin, for instance, is a September baby. Mario Lemieux was born in October. One of the greatest skaters the game has even seen, Gilbert Perreault, was born in November. Sergei Fedorov arrived as an early delivery from Santa’s sleigh (December).

But Dryden’s observations are so illuminating precisely because hockey streams as it does and because relative to other youth sports, vital skill sets in hockey (including cognitive and emotional accumen) seem to take root in player development so early . . . partly, Dryden would argue (I think), because of the streaming. Baseball and soccer, for instance, hold their respective tryouts in the spring, rendering the calendar inconsequential to the physical and emotional maturity of youth registrants in those sports.

Football, interestingly enough, registers players in the final season of the calendar, like hockey, but perhaps partly because tackle football really is a high school endeavor for most pigskinners, little that is determinative in a player’s development occurs on the gridiron at the age of seven, eight or nine. Or twelve, for that matter: football talent evaluators typically hone in on kids when they’re high school juniors and seniors and have just begun to immerse themselves in the weight room. And really, it’s only after a couple of years of college football that players earn the status of pro prospect.

It’s none of our business, of course, but it is fun to wonder: did Ray and Mrs. Bourque consider father’s own development arc in Canadian minor hockey early on as they started their family, or did they merely get swept up in a particularly schmaltzy movie on Lifetime one chilly March night twenty-some-odd years ago?

We live in uncertain times, what with a collapsing economy and threat of a recession or worse. However, such financial doom and gloom clearly does not exist in Pittsburgh. The Penguins have created “The Penguins Hockey ‘n Heels Ladies Club” for their female fans. You’ll recall that they were one of several teams last season who offered a Hockey ‘n Heels event. They’ve taken it to the next level and created a club for women with the following perks:

• One (1) game ticket in the Club Level Seating for three (3) games which includes event ticket, event premium item and buffet dinner
• Locker Room Tour
• On-Ice Demonstrations with the opportunity to sit in the Penalty Box/Player Bench
• Attend a morning skate
• Meet and greet with players after the morning skate
• Limited Edition Framed Art Piece

And what is the price for such unmitigated hockey pleasure? A mere $1,225! Never fear if you can’t spare $1K+ right now; for $180, you can eat dinner and attend one game in the club level and receive that “event premium item.” (That’s $50 more than last year.)

Doing the math, even buying tickets at $180 for each of the three games still only sets one back $540. That must be one hell of an art piece, because I don’t see how a smelly locker room tour or watching morning skate is worth close to $700. Hopefully it’s nothing like the suggestively phallic HnH logo to the right.

I salute the Penguins for attempting to cater to the female fan, something more teams should do. And I have no doubt that they’ll get at least a few takers. However, the timing couldn’t be worse for this type of venture, not to mention that it’s ridiculously overpriced.

The only way I could possibly rationalize spending that much money on a ticket, some food, and on-ice demonstrations is if the opportunity to sit in the penalty box and on the bench was during a game. Or if the event premium item was Crosby’s playoff beard stubble.

Thank you, pepper, for sharing this link, I think.

Be wary of skipping past the comments to our files. For one thing, we think we are regularly on the receiving end of some of the most thoughtful and insightful comments of any hockey blog. For another, there are moments when the sentiments of readers’ hockey hearts are more deserving of publishing than our own . . . as with the instance of a mother discovering a photo published here of her son receiving a hockey stick from Oskar Osala, and her deciding to enrich the lives of OFB bloggers with her family’s fabulous story.

“What a thrill!  We are the parents of the young Bears fan who got the stick from Oskar on Friday night. Our son is an obsessed Bears fan, and was over the moon when Oskar handed him that stick. My husband and I are long tim