6/13, 1:05 AM - Ovechkin is NHL’s Golden Boy
From left to right that’s the “Rocket” Richard Trophy, the Lester B. Pearson Award, the Hart Trophy and the Art Ross Trophy.
4/17, 1:14 PM - Somewhere Ovechkin weeps…(NSFW)
Sometimes I wonder if there really are sports gods. Then I remember than no major Philadelphia team has won a championship in nearly 25 years.
3/12, 6:00 AM - Superslacker Caps/ Flames Pregame
Hey, what can I say, I’m a busy guy. But here’s all you really need to know going into tonight’s game. This is the guy the Capitals (especially Ovechkin) will have to deal with and the Flames player to watch:
Of course, past instances may lead one to believe Ovechkin is up for the challenge:
2/18, 1:03 PM - Around the (Inter)net
Around the (Inter)net
How much is Mike Green going to cost the Capitals?…The road ahead for the Southeast Division’s team is laid out by The Peerless Prognosticator…Ovechkin’s love story from Aleksandr Ovetjkin…I’ve telling everyone all year: Atlanta is not a threat in the Southeast…What each NHL team is looking for and looking to deal at the deadline…Which NHL GMs are on the hot seat?…”The [NHL] is on pace for its third consecutive season of record revenues and attendance. It has a new cost containing salary cap that allows for massive player contracts. Perhaps most important, the product itself is thriving, with dozens of exciting young players and competitive parity that has 26 of 30 teams within at least five points of a playoff berth with less than 30 games remaining. So why does everyone have a pet project that will “fix” the NHL?”
2/7, 12:53 PM - Alex Ovechkin talks to ESPN
Alex Ovechkin recently sat down and gave an interview with ESPN’s David Amber. It’s pretty good stuff. My personal favorite is:
Q: Knowing you’re staying in Washington for the long haul, it makes a lot of Caps fans feel confident that one day the team will win the Stanley Cup. Realistically, how long will that take?
A: As soon as possible. You never know. Look at the New York Giants winning the Super Bowl. No one thought that was going to happen. So you can’t just have a plan, you have to play out the season. That game was pretty cool. We watched the game together as a team. About half the guys were cheering for New England and the other half were cheering for New York. I was cheering for the Giants because no one believed in them. Maybe that will be like us, where we can surprise everyone with a championship.
2/2, 3:15 PM - I don’t know how official any of this is, but….
James Mirtle has a poll up on his blog about who the Hart frontrunner is. Ovechkin is currently leading with 41%. I don’t think that’s enough, do you? Make your voices heard, Caps fans!
It Has Begun
Capitals fans had to know, as soon as Ovechkin’s monster 13 year, $124 million contract was announced that there would be pundits who would decry the deal and as it turn out one of the first was The Hockey News (this was originally linked to from Japers’ Rink).
Silence, Fools!
For anyone who hasn’t seen yet, Alex Ovechkin has signed his new contract with the Capitals and it’s a whopper: $124 million over 13 years.
Tarik has more details here.
I’m generally a pretty modest, reserved guy. In addition, two of the things I hate most is when people use their blogs to vent/rant and when people call names or insult other people. But you’ll have to excuse me this once because each of these journalists is guilty of at least one of the following:
(1) Chasing ridiculous rumors with no credibility
(2) Failing to understand the CBA
(3) Failing to do any research regarding the players in the Capitals organization
(4) Insulting the Capitals organization, the Capitals players, the Capitals fans and/or the city of Washington D.C.
(5) Pandering to fans in their home market
(6) Ignoring the facts in front of their faces
By doing this, all are guilty of failing to their job are journalists and consequently open themselves us to mockery by us mere mortals who aren’t paid to write about hockey,
yet somehow know exponentially more and comment on it without smugness and without insisting that anyone who doesn’t write for a major new publications has opinions that don’t matter.
Let me just be perfectly clear: to be wrong, propose ideas that I (or other Caps fans think are silly) or have an opinion I disagree with is perfectly fine, and while I may criticize the article I won’t be rude to the author. But if an author is going to willfully ignorant (or even proud of their ignorance) or is going to insult Washington D.C., the Capitals or their fans as a substitute for research, insightful commentary and good writing, well then I take the Fire Joe Morgan approach: such authors do not deserve the respect of us fans and they will not get it.
That said…
Shut up, Larry Brooks, and realize that just because the Rangers are the most obnoxious franchise of the last fifteen years doesn’t entitle them to a damn thing. You know, when you’re done with your hissy fit.
Shut up, Jack Todd, and learn the names Mike Green, Nicklas Backstrom, Semen Varlamov, Michael Neuvirth, Alexander Semin, Karl Alzer, Josh Godfrey, Chris Bourque, Francois Bouchard, Jeff Schultz, Sasha Pokulok, Books Laich, Shaone Morrison and Bruce Boudreau before you say the Capitals have a lack of young talent or can’t win with the players they have now.
Shut up, Mike Brophy, and learn the meaning of the word “cosmopolitan” before you use it in an article suggesting it’s something D.C. is not. (note: the above tip to Jack would be a good one for you to follow as well)
Shut up, Bruce Garrioch, and learn when to trust a source and learn not to insult George McPhee’s intelligence.
Shut up, Eklund, and…just…stay shut up until you actually successfully predict an NHL personnel move (being signed to a13 year extension is almost the same thing as being traded to Nashville, right?)
Ted Kulfan, I won’t tell you to shut up because you were not rude, insulting or willfully ignorant. But you were wrong, and that’s one more article for Capitals fans to look at giggle while they sit back and simply say, “Thirteen years”.
And all of you - Larry, Jack, Mike, Bruce, Ted, Eklund - sit and listen to the one voice of reason I’ve found in all this madness: Spector of Fox Sports.
Thirteen years, Caps fans. Thirteen years.
To close, here’s Ovechkin on his extension:
I cannot say how happy I am. I didn’t want to go nowhere. If I want to go somewhere, I could sign for three years.I decided I didn’t want to go anywhere, and they didn’t want lose me, so we signed a long-term deal. It won’t put more pressure on me. I will play the way that I always play.
McPhee on the Ovechkin Extension
McPhee on the Ovechkin Extension: “Of course we f*ckin’ signed him. We’re not idiots”.
Okay, I made that quote up. But isn’t that what this picture seems to say?
Alexander Ovechkin: SIGNED
I’ll have a longer version later, where I mock all the stupid sportswriters who were wrong about this but Alex Ovechkin will be a Capital for the next thirteen years.
Let’s begin, shall we?
Well, isn’t this interesting.
Well, aren’t you a smug little sportswriter? Surely with that attitude you must have insightful and valuable analysis for us, right?
Didn’t we have a year-long lockout a couple of years ago because teams like the Washington Capitals couldn’t afford to pay runaway salaries like the one they’re going to be giving Alex Ovechkin for the next 13 seasons?
Yes and no. What the owner’s primarily wanted was cost certainty, so they could have some idea of what payroll expenses would look like, especially with regard to revenues. The result of the lockout were limits on what individual teams could spend what individual players could make, each based on the league’s total revenues. This is kind of the opposite of “runaway salaries” since the salaries are in fact limited by the new CBA. I’m pretty sure that by definition the fact that salaries are limited means they aren’t runaway. Plus, if you don’t think team salaries or individual players salaries for the stars would be higher if there were no cap, you’re nuts. Know who I know? Because they were higher before the new CBA, before inflation. Plus the nine million that Ovechkin will make for the next six years and ten million for the seven after that are not going to be the top salaries for their time unless the NHL suddenly starts losing money.
So this is what you must do the next time Capitals owner Ted Leonsis, or any one of his cronies complain about their financial state…
Ignore them, laugh at them, look incredulously at them with your mouth agape, but please don’t buy their malarkey for a second.
Important just for reference.
You could say the Capitals had little choice but to offer Ovechkin somewhere near the fully mandated $10 million and they did. After all, he’s one of the league’s most talented players and the prospect of losing him was far more difficult to fathom for the Capitals than the prospect of paying him a minimum 20 percent of the team payroll.
So, point #1 was “it’s bullshit that owners like Leonsis may have difficult with their finances, and this deal proves it!” and Point #2 is “the Capitals had no choice but to sign Ovechkin to a contract paying him this much”? Also, I don’t think there’s any way Ovechkin will exceed 20% of the Capitals payroll for very much of his contract and he may not at all - the Capitals payroll is $39 million this year (with Ovechkin making about $3.8 million). If everyone resigned for the same amount (which won’t happen) payroll would go up to about $44 million, with Ovechkin making $9 million. This would be 20.45% of the payroll.
The cap hit will be $9.53 million, about as close as you can get without hitting double digits without the decimal point.
Very good observation! Nine is the closest single-digit whole number to ten! Gold star for you today, Ken!
But they did have a choice on the term. Thirteen years is simply preposterous for any player, regardless of his star quality. And now that he’s throwing that kind of money at Ovechkin, does it make sense to stop there? Well, no it doesn’t.
No one is going to insist that a thirteen year contract is without risk. But, one of the “problems” laid out earlier was that the Capitals were paying Ovechkin a “runaway” salary. You know what, Ken? One of the ways to mitigate cost over the long term is to fix it in nominal dollar amounts and watch the actual (real) value decrease as inflation occurs.
Or perhaps it is that Ken Campbell is actually an economic genius and think that the United States in headed for its first period of deflation since the late 18th century.
Leonsis and the Capitals will now have to join the arms race and spend to the cap. No sense in paying one of the best players in the game that kind of money and not surrounding him with any kind of talent.
Indeed, that Capitals should build around Ovechkin. Maybe get him a tough, playmaking center in the Peter Forsberg mold, another sniper to take the heat off of Ovechkin, some solid offensively skilled veterans and a number of gritty, tough, checking-line players.
It’s not all about offense though, as I’m sure Ken must know. The Caps probably need a good defenseman too, one who can compete for the NHL lead in goals from that position, or a guy with a rocket shot who can also get helpers and a solid, tough defenseman to balance things out. Don’t forget the need for a true number one back there, maybe a guy who can lead as well.
And then there’s the net. Well, the current goalie, a former Vezina Winner, is getting a little long in the tooth. If I were the Caps I’d a young gun, maybe someone tearing up juniors who could start at the World Junior tournament or a young guy already making his mark in the RSL. Yeah, that sounds good, get that Capitals and maybe then you can have Ovechkin weave his magic on your ice!
Oh wait, the Capitals already have all of those.
In a likely best-case scenario, Ovechkin will average 50 goals and about 100 points per season through the life of this contract. Could they not have signed three players for $3 million each, which could have given them more than that?
Maybe, maybe not. What three players could have been signed from this past year’s free agent class for nine million dollars who would give than kind of production? How would you have gotten all of them to sign with the same team? Would they all contribute the same to the physical game as Ovechkin does? Would the opposition have to account for each of them every time they stepped on the ice? Would they, collectively, become the face of the franchise? Would their merchandising sales be enough to significantly defray the cost of their contracts in the same amount that having one of the inherently most marketable players in the league will?
And so it goes on. The more we see deals like this, the more two things become clear.
First, the Rick DiPietro contract is looking better with each passing deal and secondly, the league will most definitely insist on limiting the term of deals in the next collective bargaining agreement.
Because keeping player costs down and keeping marketable, fan-favorites with one team is no way to make fans of the game, of course.