PHILADELPHIA — It’s easy to sit back and marvel at the skill and talent on the Washington Capitals roster, most of it gleaned from a decade of good drafting by former general manager George McPhee, other parts of it grafted onto that core over the past two years by the current GM, Brian MacLellan.
When the Philadelphia Flyers decided to turn Game 3 of their First round series on Monday night into a gong show, that just allowed the Caps to turn all that talent loose, hammering five power-play goals past a helpless Steve Mason. The more penalties the Flyers took, or their fans took on their behalf with idiotic behavior, the more gleefully Washington’s top-end attackers assaulted the Flyer net.
“You’ve done it now. Way to go,” admonished public address announcer Lou Nolan like an annoyed parent after the Philly “faithful” had pelted the ice with electronic bracelets, earning a delay-of-game minor for the home team.
“Foul us, and we’ll just score again” was the Capitals message, and they backed it up. When Pierre-Edouard Bellemare unnecessarily ran Dmitry Orlov head-first into the end boards partway through the third with the game already 4-1 and pretty much over, the Caps didn’t respond with goon tactics but with two more goals.
That’s the intimidation factor a team generates when it can put that much dangerous offensive talent on the ice.
But the NHL isn’t set up these days to allow for the building of truly great clubs. As long as there’s a salary cap, we’ll never again see a team like the 2002 Detroit Red Wings, with nine Hall of Famers and another, Pavel Datsyuk, soon to join them. It would take an awful lot of hometown discounts to fit a roster like that under the cap today, and again last summer we saw the champion Chicago Blackhawks stripped of some talent they could no longer afford because their stars were about to earn larger salaries.
So while the Caps, impressive as they are, have been the NHL’s best team this season and again so far in the playoffs, they have vulnerabilities. More specifically, they have parts that aren’t easy to replace if they go missing.
Obviously, No. 1 goalie Braden Holtby is one of them, as is the case for most top teams. So when Holtby limped off the ice yesterday afternoon after inadvertently colliding with a teammate during practice, naturally alarm bells went off from here to the Beltway.
Head coach Barry Trotz, however, seemed fairly satisfied he won’t be without his top puckstopper with a chance to end the series on Wednesday, and Holtby walked to the team bus after practice without a noticeable limp.
Defenceman Brooks Orpik, however, wasn’t as lucky. He wasn’t at practice and won’t play Wednesday night. Judging from the wobbly way he was carried off the ice on Monday night, after a hit into the side boards and glass by Philly’s Ryan White that was so hard it broke the boards on the other side of the glass, he won’t be back soon.
The Caps, of course, played 41 of their 82 regular season games without Orpik, and players like Taylor Chorney, Mike Weber and others filled in effectively, while Orlov blossomed into a more useful and reliable player. At the same time, the 35-year-old Orpik does offer a unique skill-set to the Caps, the “heavy” presence teams in the West seemed to have more of than teams in the East, almost a throwback style of blue-line play that’s been nearly lost in the transition to a lighter, more mobile type of defender.
When Orpik hits, he tends to leave a mark, and he hits often. Early in this series, it was he and Alex Ovechkin delivering a stern message to the rambunctious Flyers that if they cared to turn this into a crash-and-bang competition, the Caps were actually better outfitted for that.
It was two years ago that MacLellan gave Orpik a five-year, $27.5-million contract that some called insane, and the veteran defenceman’s long absence from the Caps backline this season seemed to suggest that Washington might not get value for that investment.
Even if Orpik doesn’t return soon, however, they already may have.
The way Karl Alzner explains it, it’s because of Orpik, along with other vets with championship experience like Justin Williams and Mike Richards, that there’s a calmness about this year’s Capitals, something that was surely evident in Game 3 when the Flyers wanted to create chaos and Washington responded for the most part with cool efficiency.
Orpik was gone by the time the nuttiness really began in the third, but the Caps didn’t alter their approach.
“Just the fact we can come in after any period, whether it’s really good or really bad or middle of the road, we still have the same attitude coming out the next period,” said Alzner. “We could be up 4-0 or down 4-0. We come out with the right attitude, and that’s a pretty cool feeling we haven’t had.”
Alzner, 27, has been around this Washington hockey story for nearly a decade, and he’s seen all the disappointments and springtime collapses. He’s seen talented teams that lacked the necessary will and poise. So when he says a player like Orpik has supplied a different internal vibe for this team, it’s meaningful. These Caps are different, and perhaps it shouldn’t have been surprising that although they had an optional practice scheduled on Tuesday, the entire team took to the ice even though Orpik wasn’t one of them.
“He’s the voice that everybody listens to when he says something,” said Alzner said of his fallen teammate.
So Orpik’s gone from the Washington lineup, and probably for a while, at least. The Caps might be able to replace one or two of their talented forwards because they have so many, but they don’t have a player quite like Orpik to put the fear of God into enemy players or block a shot with whatever part of his body is available.
Hockey analytics tends to discount these kinds of intangibles these days, or at least suggests they are highly overrated or exaggerated, which is probably correct. Still, it’s been interesting to watch New York Rangers defenceman Dan Girardi become a whipping boy for analytics experts this season at the same time New York coach Alain Vigneault protests that he believes Girardi helps his team and is very much needed.
It’s the gap that often exists between the numbers and traditional hockey thought, and the people who can marry the two philosophies probably get it about right. After all, how can you quantify the impact of a player who causes the opponent to get rid of the puck a half-second early, or says the right thing at the right time in the dressing room, or provides a calming influence to a team that has a history of getting rattled when the pressure ramps up and the spotlight gets white-hot?
You can’t. What you do is understand that Barry Trotz seems to have this Washington team finally fulfilling its promise, and the fact he sends out Orpik for 20 minutes or more of ice time every game he’s healthy is because Trotz believes he makes a difference, one that may not be quantifiable.
Or replaceable.
