Sports Metaphors for Today: Watching Washington Capitals Hockey… at a Basketball Court

It was June 7, 2018. The air inside Capital One Arena was electric and palpable, heavy, and stifling from the emotional turmoil of twenty thousand people holding their collective breath.

I was submerged in that massive, pulsating sea of red, with the jumbotron casting its hyper-digital glow over an anxious crowd. The Capitals had just iced the puck with under a second left (0.6 after official adjustment) and  were leading 4-3.

The sight was surreal. The arena was sold out but the actual game was being played in Vegas; the fans that were gathered for a watch party. In fact, the arena was still configured for basketball from an earlier Mystics game. But the energy that was boiling over was from playoff hockey and in this case, was the release of four decades worth of simmering, pent-up frustration.

When the referee dropped the puck and it was harmlessly swiped into the corner, two parallel celebrations kicked off when the clock struck zero.

Over in Vegas, a kaleidoscopic wave of gloves, helmets, and sticks from the Capitals’ players flew through the air, a hockey celebration symbolizing graduation to the pinnacle of pro hockey.

Back in DC, the goal horn blared in tandem with the blasts of the confetti cannon. The guttural, mechanical blare accompanied the collective roar of the crowd, creating a symphony that thundered past my saturated eardrums, vibrating right into the pit of my stomach.

I turned to my brother. We didn’t exchange words, mostly because we couldn’t hear each other, but also because words weren’t needed. We just hugged. It was a brotherly embrace that had been decades in the making.

A playoff run can be like a cheap, fused suit. No matter how you try to take care of it, invariably it finds some way to bubble and is finished at that point. There is only ever one champion, so you learn to expect disappointment. You brace for the seams to split or the fabric to lose its shape. But not that year.

The Washington Capitals’ 2018 Stanley Cup victory was, in every sense, a modern Hero’s Journey. I’ve had this vignette in my mind since that night but didn’t have the time or the forum to write it on.

Until now.

As I sat down to write though, I realized the slant of this piece would be different than what I had in mind almost eight years ago. Today, from the vantage point of a "professionally paused" tech manager, I needed to acknowledge current events and the context of what a lot of us are currently facing currently in our careers. The length of it also meant splitting it up to tell the story like I want to.

And like most stories, this one starts with family.

Sports Creating Family Ties

My connection to this team didn't start with Ovechkin. It started almost two decades earlier with my grandfather. He was the one who introduced me to the game, albeit indirectly.

My dad’s father was from the old country, immigrating here to escape the unrest back home. While most of my memories of him have faded (outside his fashion sense which is a story for another time), I do still remember sitting on the floor beside his recliner as we watched the Caps play on an old analog TV, the ones where you turned a dial to change channels.

We never talked as we watched the games, but we would react similarly, jumping up in tandem if the Caps made a good play or simultaneously groaning if they made a bad one.

Of course, I didn’t understand what I was in for when I started watching with my grandfather. The very first game I watched with him happened to be the four OT classic playoff game against the New York Islanders.

It also happened to be the first time I ever stayed up past my bedtime.

When Pat LaFontaine scored at 1:58 am the following morning, completing the Islanders comeback from three games to one down to win the series four games to three, I wondered if it was some type of cosmic punishment for trying to be sneaky and stay up late.

The Capitals' Journey: The Likeable… Underdogs

For years, the "Capitals Curse" was a very real thing we carried in D.C., all the way back to the 1980s. Every year we made the playoffs ended in typical playoff heartbreak and living (down) to the moniker of “Choking Dogs."

There were a few bright moments in the 80s and 90s.

·         John Druce emerging from out of nowhere to score 14 goals and help the Caps reach the conference finals.

·         Beating the Penguins for the first time in a playoff series (the only time until the Caps would win the Cup), catalyzed by a mid-season coaching change and sparked by trade-deadline acquisition Joe Juneau.

·         The Olaf Kolzig fueled run to the Stanley Cup finals which abruptly ended at the hands of the Red Wings dynasty.

But those moments were few and far between. The Caps had solid to fairly good teams, full of likable players. The team usually outperformed their collective talent during the regular season. Sometimes they even captured division titles.

But none of those teams were great. None had superstar talents like Mario Lemieux who could take over games.

There was brief flicker of hope at the turn of the century.

The team was sold to Ted Leonsis in 1999. Ted was more visible and active in his involvement with the team. A few years into his stewardship, it culminated with the acquisition of Jaromir Jagr.

We had lost to the Jagr-led Penguins in back-to-back years. The Penguins teams finished behind the Caps in the regular season standings but woke up in the playoffs to skate circles around our plucky, hard-working, but ultimately limited heroes. They were the classic example of a skilled team maybe coasting a bit through the regular season but waking up when the stakes were highest. Jagr was heir apparent to Mario Lemieux at that point so acquiring him was a seismic event for Capitals fans.

He was easily the most talented player the team had ever had up to that point.

Alas, it just turned out to be a false dawn.

While Jagr clearly had the talent, he was also unmotivated and Caps fans got a two-season exhibit of what talent without effort looks like. It definitely gave me a better appreciation of the blue-collar teams we were known for in the past.

After trading him (and watching him turn back into a dominant player), the Caps tanked and for the first time in my memory, were just outright bad.

But timing is everything I suppose and that first year A.J. (after Jagr), the Caps won the draft lottery and the right to the first pick in that summer’s entry draft. The draft that happened to feature a prodigy coming out of Russia.

Alexander Ovechkin.

Ovechkin's Odyssey

Today, you can’t talk about the Capitals without talking about The Great Eight. As he contemplates whether to play one more year (as of the time of this blog post), he has already left behind an undeniable legacy.

Hockey was an afterthought in the DC area prior to Ovechkin. The team was competitive for the most part but without championships and without stars with the “It” factor (ones who wanted to be here anyway). The Caps were a charcoal suit: perfectly serviceable but not going to be something talked about at the water cooler.

He changed all of that.

The Internet had not quite exploded yet so there wasn’t a bevy of media available on him like there would be today.

The first time anyone saw him, you could tell right away he was the real deal. He was the type of player who brought you out of your seat every time he touched the puck because you knew something special could happen.

But his aura was different. He was the definition of kinetic. I think of Pavel Bure and even the Caps own Peter Bondra as players who were fast, great goal scorers. But I think of them as motorcycle fast, nimble, and able to zip through heavy traffic. I think of Ovie as runaway freight train fast. You could just feel that raw power coming from him as he skated even when watching him on TV.

The toolset was so unique because it was all done with him going full speed. Normal convention was most players slowed a tick when handling the puck. Not him. He could dangle NHL-level defensemen. He could beat NHL goalies from distance with a snapshot.

All going at full speed. Simply head and shoulders over anyone the Caps have had before.

And then there was the physicality.

The freight train analogy is appropos on because that’s how he delivered body checks. His first shift in the NHL was foreshadowing of his career as he delivered a check that not only rattled the player but broke a stanchion holding the glass.

He sought out big hits with a fanatic zeal, looking for something to do to make use of his large body in between scoring goals.

Ovi was the industry disruptor. Just like AI today is disrupting the tech industry, Ovi and the team Washington built around him disrupted the NHL and put the Capitals of all teams as the NHL poster child for fast, skilled hockey.

Curl and drags. Beautiful individual and team goals. Things I had associated with other teams in watching the Caps for over twenty years was now just another night for Ovie and the Young Guns.

The Hero and the Curse

Now that the Capitals finally had a generational player to build around, it should have been straightforward, right?

Just like today for a lot of us, life is not that simple.

For all his and the teams’ talent, Ovechkin’s early career was a flashy, off-the-rack tuxedo... on a bodybuilder. The fabric and cut might have been visually striking, but it was restrictive when it came to the wearing during the dance.

Even with arguably one of the best players in the NHL and a talented cast around him, they could not overcome the cloud that seemed to coalesce over the team during the playoffs, still consistently falling short.

Unlike the teams of the 80s and 90s where it could be argued those teams hit their ceilings, the misses from Ovechkin and company were viewed through the lens of underachievement. By the eye test and the analytics that were emerging as a part of modern sports, the Caps -should- have won the Cup early on.

But that’s why the play the games. And hockey is a fickle a mistress as there is.

The first couple of playoff series they lost, it was understandable. It was an accepted rite of passage for young, talented teams to lose their first few playoffs as they grew. By Ovie’s third season though, they looked the part of a Stanley Cup favorite. The Caps finished with the best regular season. Facing the eighth seeded Montreal Canadians, the Caps jumped out to a three games to one lead and it looked like the birth of a dynasty was about to unfold.

Then they lost game five. Then game six. And then game seven.

The disappointment that year... was different. Far different. That year, the Caps, their fans, and everyone in the hockey universe thought they had their best chance ever to win the Stanley Cup. But to bow out in the first round to the eighth seed, blowing another three games to one lead?

Choking dogs indeed...

To be continued...