Caps Media Luncheon - Brian Pothier

This morning and afternoon was the Capitals annual season-opening media luncheon. The day kicked off with the team photo, in which it was revealed that Mike Knuble was given the assistant captain's A left vacated by Sergei Fedorov, followed by a practice and then the actual free food.

One of the cool things about the lunch period, and the real reason the press was there, was that the players came out, had lunch too, and chatted with the media. There were some group interviews with Bruce Boudreau, George McPhee, Ted Leonsis, and a couple of the players, but for the most part it was one-on-one talks between players and media.

Image: clydeorama(Flickr)

I had the chance toward the end of the session to grab defenseman Brian Pothier for a few questions. A bit of this interview is into an article I'm working on at the moment for DC Sports Box, but I thought I'd post the entire transcript here because there's some good stuff that wasn't relevant for my story.

Q: This year the team is carrying 8 defensemen to start the regular season. Have the coaches told you what the plan is regarding players moving in and out?

POTHIER: No, honestly I have no idea what the plans are. I’m not even sure who’s going to play in Boston. We’re all capable players, even if you look at the guys who have been sent down, we have three or four guys that are in Hershey that could step in and play, jump in as seamless as having one of us in there. We are deep in that position, we have a lot of guys we can insert. It’s going to be difficult decisions for the coaches, but overall we have the bodies to get it done.

You had a great preseason, statistically and otherwise (note: In four games Pothier's stat line was: 1 G (OT GWG), 3 A, +3, 4 PIM, 19:13 ATOI). Is that heartening going into the regular season?

Yeah. I mean every time I step on the ice I want to be successful, I want to play a good game and put in a good effort, it felt like…I played what, four games in the preseason, I felt like I got a little bit better each game, a little more consistent each game, and that’s the goal. Every time I go on the ice I want to be successful and I want to contribute, and I want to make good plays. It’s always nice to have good results like that in the preseason.

Are you looking forward to going back to Boston?

Yeah that’s my hometown, that’s where I grew up, I always have a lot a friends and family floating around there. Every time I go back there it’s a special treat for me, to see the old Bruins jerseys in warm-ups in always kind of surreal and weird, but it’s pretty cool.

Plus they’re the top dogs in the East, and you guys have a very tough schedule to start the season.

That’s a big litmus test for us, the first month. We have some big challenges, those first three games are against good teams, home openers, and you know there’s going to be a lot of emotion and exciting environments, and it will be a great test for us to start the season.

Caps Media Luncheon Release

Tomorrow afternoon I'll be in the Verizon Center, along with my photographer/EIC Al Santos and fellow reporter Daniel Epstein, for the Caps Media Luncheon.

The award-winning Capitals media staff always goes above and beyond when dealing with the media, and in their five-page press release for the event they include 'storylines' for all 26 players (including those on LTIR) who will begin the regular season as part of the Capitals organization.

Some of them were interesting, some of them not (what can you really say about Alexander Ovechkin in three sentences that any media member or fan won't know?), but I immediately skipped to the bottom of the numerical-order list.

Yup, Michael Nylander was, in fact, at the bottom of that list. And here's what the Caps media staff had to say:

92-Michael Nylander
Michael Nylander doesn’t appear to have a spot in Washington’s opening night lineup, but he’s a skilled, veteran player who may prove valuable if needed. After two difficult seasons since returning to Washington as a free agent, you can expect him to be eager to make a positive impact.

Talk about turning lemons into lemonade. I'd be almost afraid to talk to Nylander...what do you say to a guy whose employer has said they publicly don't want him, but hasn't yet found a way to get rid of him?

Small Press Expo '09

Saturday afternoon I begged off covering the Maryland-Rutgers football game (good choice!) primarily because of a lot of schoolwork, but Sara and I took a break for a few hours and ventured to Bethesda and the Small Press Expo.

For those of you who have never heard of SPX - and that's probably most people, since I'm fairly plugged in to that world and I didn't know about it until recently - I'll quote from their website: "In its fourteenth year SPX now serves as the preeminent showcase for the exhibition of independent comic books and the discovery of new creative talent. SPX will bring together over 400 artists and publishers to meet their readers, booksellers, distributors, and each other."

Coming in to the weekend I was most looking forward to meeting the artists of a few of my favorites webcomics: Diesel Sweeties, Scary Go Round (now Bad Machinery), Questionable Content, Goats, and Hark! A Vagrant.

It was fantastic to meet all of them, and I got some great sketches, but one of the highlights was meeting an artist I have heard of but did not know would be at SPX: Rob Ullman.



Ullman is a multi-talented artist who currently has a strip, Traffic & Weather, at Richmond Magazine and has appeared in lots of other places in print and online. I know him through what can be termed a fascination with him at Uni Watch Blog, a paean to all things related to sports uniforms. Paul Lukas, the blog's proprietor, absolutely loves another aspect of Ullman's oeuvre: his pin-up illustrations of women wearing (and only wearing) lovingly-rendered jerseys.

It's quite possible Ullman was the only exhibitor at SPX to have anything remotely related to sports at his Atom-Bomb Bikini table, but he did, and hooray for that. He had quite a few collection of his Teeny Bikini pin-up collections (one of which, with the cover on the left, I bought) in addition to other pin-ups and illustrations he did while an illustrator for Dan Savage's Savage Love column.



He also had a fantastic short collection of illustrated stories from the Original Six era, Old-Time Hockey Tales!. Dollar for dollar it was the best $2 I spent that day. Ullman's tales were ones I know well - Bill Barilko, Terry Sawchuk, the Rocket Richard riots - but the treatment and obvious love of the artist for the subject matter made it a great little text.

Though this was my first SPX I've been to a few San Diego Comic-Con's and other similar conventions, and it's a pretty true characterization to say every actual artist sitting behind a booth is usually thrilled to talk with a fan or prospective fan, and Ullman was no exception. We talked for maybe 5 minutes about hockey, Uni Watch Blog, and other stuff.

Ulmman is a true hockey fan, which was great to hear. He is also a Pittsburgh Penguins fan, which is nice for him but not so good otherwise. He did refrain from any gloating after I mentioned my Capitals fandom, and actually gave me some words of sympathy. He also proffered a couple of stickers with the image at the top of this post, a gorgeous dark-haired woman in an old-school Caps uniform, which he said he made as a peace offering for any Caps fans he might meet (he'll also be at the Baltimore Comic-Con in two weeks, where I imagine he'll be handing out a few more of those).

All in all it was a great afternoon, and wonderful to meet Ullman in addition to the other writers, artists, and publishers at SPX. Maybe I'll commission a pin-up some time...Sara in a Stanley Cup, maybe?

Hockey Lexicon 1 - Hope Pass, Cobb

Learned a pair of new hockey vocabulary words in the Caps locker room tonight. The first one, from Karl Alzner, actually makes a lot of sense: hope pass. As in "no-look, speculative, I hope there turns out to be someone at the end of this" pass.

The second one, courtesy of Andrew Gordon, is: cobb. As in goose egg, nil, nada, zip. Usage: "We were down four-cobb after about two periods and ended up coming back and winning a big one in overtime" is how Gordon described the game he appeared in last season in NYR when the Caps were down 4-0 and ended up winning 5-4 in OT.

Hope pass is a good one, and I hope to work it into my vocabulary. Cobb makes absolutely no sense, so I'm gonna try even harder to use it on a regular basis.

At the Rink - Caps v. Sabres 9/21

A couple quick hits in the first intermission at Verizon Center.

-As Corey Masisak pointed out on Twitter, the Caps banners and retired numbers have been taken down from the rafters. As my friend and colleague Craig Stone postulated, they might be redoing them all to have a consistent design and color scheme.
-The ice looked pretty good before the game, but a few players took unassisted spills. I'm hoping it's because there was a Dinosaur show here through yesterday (no, really) and not a sign of things to come.
-Mike Knuble has not looked good. He seems out of sync with Backstrom and Ovechkin- they are dipsy-doodling through the neutral zone and he just wants to go to the net. Took a bad hooking penalty as well.
-Also not a good period for Andrew Gordon, simply because he only has 51 seconds of ice on 2 shifts. Andrew Joudrey is not faring much better, with 2:44 on 4 shifts. There have been a lot of PPs and PKs for the Caps, so hopefully with even strength situations they'll get on more.
-Chris Bourque, on the other hand, has gotten a lot of ice, notably 2:05 of power play time. What's interesting is much of that was spent at the point on the Caps second PP unit, paired with John Carlson.

At the Rink - Caps Media Day

Yesterday morning, the day Caps players had to report for training camp, was also Washington's season-beginning media day. I was there when Jose Theodore, Brooks Laich, Nicklas Backstrom, Mike Knuble and Brendan Morrison, as well as George McPhee, took the mic for some questioning.

A fair amount of the material from the day will go into various preview and preseason articles at DC Sports Box, but I wanted to share a few nice nuggets that probably won't make the articles:

-Brooks Laich has dubbed new teammate Brendan Morrison "Shifty," for some moves the center pulled in informal scrimmages this past week.
-Not only did Mike Knuble remember Piney Orchard (Washington's practice facility prior to Kettler) from his time as a visiting Red Wing in 1998, he remembered that it was both "dingy" and "dark." (Disclosure: I used to play summer hockey at Piney and worked in the pro shop for a couple months, and Knuble is telling the truth)
-When Knuble commented how much he was looking forward to playing with Washington's world-class players, he was staring directly at Alexanders Ovechkin and Semin, who were on the ice at the moment (not that it's any surprise)
-Many of the players were sporting Under Armour shirts with the phrases "Get Ready" and "Its Our Time" bookmarking an image of the Stanley Cup on the back.
-Among other duties, all the players took time to sign about 50 feet of jerseys, sticks and other merchandise. A couple players (I saw Brooks Laich and Boyd Gordon, among others) took time to sign for small groups of fans stationed at both ends of the staff/media-only sections.

Okay, I'll admit that section felt a little more tabloid-y than expected, but I still plan on From the Rink to be one of, if not the primary, content type for this blog. Specific game information has a place in game reports,, more in-depth reporting in feature articles, but some of the 'lighter side' stuff is the thing that makes people love hockey, and professional sports, and I'm all for that.

A New Twist on an Old Story

There was a very interesting article at Puck Prospectus today (thanks to Puck Daddy for the link) regarding the Ovechkin-Crosby debate, specifically looking at statistical projects for next season as well as matching each player's 2008-2009 season against historical comparables.

What struck me, beyond the simple (and encouraging) projection that Ovechkin will score 118 points (and likely win the Rocket Richard, Art Ross, and Hart), and the fact that Ovechkin is projected to play all 82 games while Crosby projects to 74, is the criteria listed by Robert Vollman (for Crosby) and Andrew Rothstein (for Ovechkin) to be considered 'the best player in the world' (at least in 2010) is to score 110+ points, lead his team to the Cup finals and win the gold medal.

The problem with that assertion is that it's very likely for both players to be in the same point range, and the chances are much higher for neither to make the finals than it is for one (though currently the odds at Bet365 are 11/2 for Pittsburgh and 12/1 for the Caps!).

However, it is very likely that one of the two young men will be on the gold medal podium at the conclusion of the 2010 Olympics. The Games are being contested in Vancouver and you better believe the home team is the favorite. At that same betting site Team Canada is getting unbelievable even 1/1 odds 1/1 odds on winning it all, while Russia is by far the next-highest contender at 5/2 odds.

I'll be rooting for the U.S., and Sweden is a very strong contender, but realistically either Ovechkin or Crosby will have a gold medal on their resume come February 2010. Also realistically, one gold won't decide the debate between a 23-year-old and a 21-year-old (especially if Canada wins) considering they still have at least 1 more Olympics in them, one of which will be in Russia (assuming the NHLPA decides to attend) and no doubt will combine for at least one or two more Stanley Cups.

Nonetheless, it's an interesting field of battle that has been completely underplayed to this point in time. Crosby has the Cup, Ovechkin has the Hart, but chances are both will have won both by the time their careers end. Olympic gold medals, on the other hand...