The History of the Washington Capitals(Est. 1973)
CAPS FAN BATTLE CRY: "ONE CUP BEFORE I DIE"
It’s the battle cry of any long suffering fan. Years and years of coming up empty. Having a great team on paper and then going into witness protection during the playoffs. Not even successful enough to utter, “Wait Until Next Year!” Taking futility to a brand new level.
“One Before I Die”
The Washington Capitals have had a colorful, if not always successful 42-year existence; one whose fan base can utter the “One Before I Die” battle cry. They’ve had two owners (Abe Pollin and Ted Leonsis), six General Managers, 17 coaches, 14 captains, and hundreds of players. Forty-two years, not one Stanley Cup. 26 NHL Playoff appearances. A .525 all-time winning percentage but a 109-129 playoff record. Nine division titles without reaching the conference finals. Only one trip past the second round. Only one conference championship. Only one Stanley Cup final series. Zero final series wins. Did I mention zero Stanley Cups? Indeed a tortured existence. If you listen closely, you can almost hear Ursula bellowing, “Poor unfortunate soul!”
Can somebody say, “Just One Before I Die?”
by Rick Benson
Their initial season in 1974-75 set league records for futility-- a 1-39 road record, 17 straight regulation losses, fewest wins in a season (final record 8-67-5), fewest points in a modern-era full season (21), most goals allowed (446) and finally, worst goal differential (-265). Washington was shutout ten times. On four occasions, they lost by double digits. Goalie Michel Belhumeur, who shared net duties with Ron Low, played in 35 games with zero wins. After the season’s lone road victory, Capitals left winger and team prankster Garnet “Ace” Bailey grabbed a green Rubbermaid trash can and went back out on the ice and did a victory lap; hoisting the can like the Stanley Cup.
Season two saw a slight improvement to 11 wins. Season three saw a new record 25-game losing streak. Their early years had the Capital Centre filled with opposing fans when the Philadelphia Flyers or one of the New York teams came to town. After their ninth season, it took a grass roots season ticket phone-a-thon to prevent the team from seriously considering relocation.
Once the Capitals turned things around to become a winning team; the heartbreak transferred over to inexplicably frustrating early exits from the playoffs. 14 straight years of playoff appearances beginning with the 1982-83 season could not result in advancement beyond the second round. Stars like Mike Gartner, Ryan Walter, Bobby Carpenter, Rod Langway, Scott Stevens, Mike Ridley, Michal Pivonka, Dale Hunter, Peter Bondra and Olaf Kolzig called Landover, MD home but none were able to help bring the Cup home with them.
The inglorious moments have been plentiful. There was the 1987 Easter Epic when the Capitals lost Game 7 of the Patrick Division Semifinals at 1:56 in the morning on Easter Sunday; despite outshooting the New York Islanders 75-52. Pat LaFontaine’s goal was scored at 68:47 of overtime. There was Flyers goalie Ron Hextall scoring an empty net goal in the 1989 Patrick Division Semifinals. There was the 21-game suspension levied on Dale Hunter in 1993 when he checked Pierre Turgeon of the Islanders from behind as he was celebrating a goal; separating Turgeon’s shoulder. There was Esa Tikkanen missing a wide-open net that would have iced game 2 of the Caps only trip to the Cup finals in 1998 which was the turning point of the series. There was the 2004 Salary Dump when Washington unloaded Jaromir Jagr, Peter Bondra and Robert Lang (who became the first player in NHL history to be traded while leading the league in scoring). There was the 2008 departure of fan-favorite and franchise icon Olaf “Olie the Goalie” Kolzig to division rival Tampa Bay. There were 3-games-to-1 blown series leads in 1992 and 1995 against the hated Penguins and another one in 2010 to 8th seed Montreal.
Congratulations if you haven’t lost your breakfast yet.
The Capitals history hasn’t been all misery though. Washington avenged years of beat downs from Philadelphia in the 1983-84 playoffs as they swept the Flyers three straight to win their first ever playoff series. The two would meet again in the 1987-88 playoffs; a thrilling series that came down to game 7 at the Capital Centre. As if Flyers fans needed another reason to hate Dale Hunter, he saw an opening between Hextall's pads and fired a shot that hit the back of the net 5:57 into overtime, giving the Capitals a thrilling 5-4 victory and a 4-games-to-3 series triumph.
The game would not only be one of the most disheartening and gutwrenching for Flyer fans, it would also be the last for Philadelphia's young crackerjack head coach Mike Keenan, who left in the offseason to take the head job with the Chicago Blackhawks.
As for Washington, the victory was recently voted the #1 game in the history of the franchise.
In 1988-89, the Capitals won their first Patrick Division title, but their arch-nemesis Flyers knocked them out of the playoffs in six games in the opening round. It would take Washington 11 more years to win another division title in 1999-2000 but Y2K would not change the Caps playoff misfortune as their new future nemesis—the Pittsburgh Penguins—knocked them out of the quarterfinals in five. Next season 2000-01--another division title, another quarterfinal lost to the Penguins.
For the next six seasons, Washington only made one post season appearance; another quarterfinal loss to Tampa Bay in 2002-03. Along with the NHL lockout in 2004-05, hockey had faded into oblivion in the nation’s capital. And then along came Alexander the Great.
Alexander Ovechkin, who had been drafted number one prior to the lockout, made his long awaited Capitals debut in the 2005-06 season. The Great One would become one of the premier players in the NHL and is already the unquestioned greatest Capital of all time. Washington would win four straight division titles starting with the 2007-08 season and seven over the last ten seasons. Three times, including the 2015-16 and 2016-17 seasons, the Capitals won the President’s Trophy for the league’s top regular season record. But still—you guessed it---no Stanley Cup.
You have to feel for Ovechkin. All of hockey’s greats: Gordie Howe, Bobby Orr, Bobby Hull, Jean Beliveau, Bernie Parent, Guy LaFleur, Brian Trottier, Wayne Gretzky, Mario Lemieux, Mark Messier, Patrick Roy, Dominik Hasek, Martin Brodeur, Steve Yzerman and Sidney Crosby (ERRR!) ---all have hoisted Lord Stanley’s Cup in victory. Ovechkin deserves his moment. So do the Capitals.
One before I die.
For Capitals and their fans, a familiar sound and fury . . . amounting to nothing
By Thomas Boswell, The Washington Post , May 10, 2017
The boos started in Verizon Center with 33.5 seconds left to play and all hope gone — again. The wave of disappointment from Washington fans, to give them credit, was not terribly loud, a kind of ritual admonition administered annually with only middling conviction to the incorrigible child of American pro sports: the Washington Capitals.
The punishment perfectly fit the crime because the Caps played with merely middling conviction themselves in their season-ending 2-0 loss to Pittsburgh in Game 7 of their second-round Stanley Cup playoff series, the exact postseason juncture at which this pupil with “A” talent almost always hands in a “D” paper on the final exam.
Some of the red-clad Caps fans trickled out of Verizon during a last desperate, pathetically pointless Washington timeout. But the huge majority stayed seated. Who has the bad manners to stand up and walk out before the funeral is finished?
This was, indeed, a funeral for hockey hope. The Caps, who claimed publicly long ago that they would win multiple Stanley Cups in the Alex Ovechkin Era, and who were predicted to win the Cup often, including this year, may never be so strong again. Or face a central foe so wounded as the Penguins, who were without their best goalie, their best defenseman, Kris Letang, and, in Game 7, useful veterans defenseman Trevor Daley and winger Carl Hagelin, too.
Unless the NHL had allowed the Caps to get hydraulic lifts to lift the rink and tilt the ice toward the Penguins’ goal, Washington couldn’t have had a better setup for its ultimate redemption opportunity.
As an extra penalty, the Caps get to gaze at the highway strewn with rose petals that the Penguins now have ahead of them for consecutive Cups. Next, the Penguins meet the Ottawa Senators, who were outscored in the regular season and rank 18th in the league by hockey-reference’s SRS ranking system. The best in the Western Conference, the Chicago Blackhawks and Minnesota Wild, are already out.
“It’s just extreme disappointment,” said distinguished veteran Karl Alzner, an almost indestructible defenseman who is a free agent and presumably will be paid more to play elsewhere next season. “We honestly thought we were the best team in the playoffs, and we showed it in [flashes]. But the second-round [exit] again . . .
“Maybe there’s something deep down that guys feel. Every year, we change [players] and say it’s a ‘new team.’ But maybe there is something deep down . . . but I don’t feel it personally.”
“Lot of new faces next year. It’s going to be a different team,” Brooks Orpik said. But he didn’t mean it in the familiar “we’ll be better” sense. This was supposed to be the all-in best-we’ll-ever-make-it Caps team. Now, they’re all out.
Everything that is worth doing is hard. But everything hard is not worth doing.
That defines the difference between being a Capital and being a fan of the Caps.
If you play for this almost mighty but ultimately still miserable NHL franchise, you still have a career, you may make a fortune and, even if you lose, you were still one of the gladiators in the arena, not just a watcher.
So, there’s little need for much sympathy for the Caps right now. This defeat, in the supreme tension-packed game that was supposed to end jinxes and ignite a stampede toward a Stanley Cup victory, may be seen in retrospect as the beginning of the end of an elite 12-season era built around Ovechkin.
In an irony so galling that it was quintessential Caps, Ovechkin was on the ice for both Penguins goals; but he was surrounded by unfamiliar company thanks to his demotion to the third line by Coach Barry Trotz before Game 5. The strategy that helped the Caps get back in this series with wins in Games 5 and 6 was a bust in this final battle as the first line of Nicklas Backstrom, T.J. Oshie and Andre Burakovsky either mishandled passes near the Penguins goal or missed their short attempts from inside 10 feet completely.
As soon as Bryan Rust scored the first Penguins goal in the second period, the Caps’ response was to act as if the Pittsburgh net was smaller than a matchbox. When Rust turned the goal light red, the scoreboard said “11:11,” perhaps appropriate for the defending champion Penguins, who will now be huge favorites to win a third Cup in the era of Sidney Crosby, the superstar who has always trumped Ovechkin when it mattered most.
A franchise that has no Stanley Cup victories finished this game with no goals, either. That galling and symbolic “0” summarizes the feeling of zero-at-the-bone that, for months and maybe years, will chill the heart of any fan who recalls this night when all demons were supposed to be exorcised and instead more were born.
If the healthy Caps, who had many advantages over the injured Penguins in this series, evoke chilly feelings, then truckloads of sympathy should be reserved for the fans of this bizarre team that is simultaneously wonderful and woebegone.
Those fans wear their Red to the rafters. And they rock the place. They scream themselves hoarse. They wear, and pay for, the jerseys of not just the stars but the backup goaltender and the team enforcer. Some have followed the franchise for 42 years. Others have come aboard in the last dozen years of the Great Eight or even the last two years of back-to-back regular season Presidents’ Trophies.
They are all, roughly speaking, equally miserable now. All of them ask, if not this year, when?
As for management, they’ve tried almost everything. But there are penalties to pay for even the best-intentioned failures. When the ticket office opens — t-o-m-o-r-r-o-w — the Caps will hold their breath to see the pace of season ticket cancellations or reductions.
In honor of this nearly annual disaster, which began in earnest with a blown two-game lead in 1985, we offer the mandatory Caps wisecrack.
What does the design of the home of every Cap of the last generation have in common?
None of their houses have a kitchen.
Because they just can’t stand the heat.
For the past two years, the best defense of the Capitals is that the true Stanley Cup final may have been played in the second round when Washington met Pittsburgh. If that offers consolation, then hold it tight.
But in the Capitals’ locker room, nobody was buying such comforts. Even though the Caps play on ice, they still melt every time. As their seasons end, their faces seem to melt, too, in an all-to-familiar scene of sorrow that blends into a kind of blank disbelieving stare.
“Tonight, we were hoping . . .” Alzner said. Then he stopped.
This was the night when the best hope the Capitals have ever had produced a big, fat ugly goose egg and expired.
