McPhee is badly hurting Caps with his passive off-season approach

“We’re not getting 20 guys playing we’re getting 13 and 14 guys every night rather than having everybody coming to play. Tonight we had 5 or 6 passengers again.”

That was Bruce Boudreau after game 5 of our first round series with the Montreal Canadiens. It was a problem that, as Bruce indicated, and anyone who had a television knew, lasted beyond one game. To be blunt, a number of Capitals simply didn’t show up.  

Now if a number of our players in the playoffs aren’t bringing their best effort, just when exactly are we going to get “it” from them? Furthermore, if some players didn’t show up, (as Bruce indicated) how could you possibly think you could get away with making no changes to that team? This is WashingtonD.C., not the Wizard of Oz! We can’t just spray fairy dust and expect those intensity and proficiency issues to be fixed.

For most organizations, those at the top set the tone for understanding the urgency of a situation and responding in kind. For this reason, General Manager George McPhee is scarring me a lot right now.

 

"We got 121 points last year because we're a pretty good team and we don't really need a lot.”  George McPhee as quoted by Tarik El-Bashir in the Washington Post. (7/2/10)

 

Wow! If this is what McPhee believes, we are making a colossal mistake. By attaching extra weight to the regular season, where players have more room to operate and that bizarrely gives out points based on a shootout, McPhee is ignoring the ultimate reality. As hard as it may be to acknowledge, we know that last season, the Capitals struggled to raise and adjust their game for the higher level of play. Maybe I'm getting bogged down in semantics, but by calling the Caps a,  “pretty good team,” McPhee is also choosing the path of least resistance and ignoring some of the other lessons of our first round playoff loss. For as we learned, being a "pretty good team" in the regular season, hardly constitutes a guarantee that your power-play will perform at the same level in the playoffs.

That he would choose this path is somewhat surprising. Indeed, it was McPhee in 2004 that made the toughest decision possible, but the pragmatically correct one in convincing owner Ted Leonsis that the only way to bring the Capitals back from irrelevance in 2004, was to completely rebuild the team by cutting salary and ties to those who weren’t producing relative to their high contracts.

That McPhee acted so aggressively when the Caps were bad and has so heavily put the brakes on now that the Caps are great raises an interesting parallel. While McPhee is great at producing excellence where once there was embarrassment, is he less comfortable pulling the trigger on moves that could bring the Caps from excellent to elite? I think the answer may be yes. For despite being 15 million under the cap and having definite needs in terms of getting a shutdown defender and second line center, we haven’t done anything, as others like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia and New Jersey pulled the trigger on deals that should improve their team defense.

This isn’t the only time either that McPhee has been hesitant to aggressively improve areas of need. Last season the Capitals began the year with no additions on defense, even as Washington’s blue-liners were shown to be terrible at keeping the Capitals crease clear in a 2009 playoff series loss to the Penguins. Prior to that second round loss, the Capitals were one of the few Stanley Cup contenders to make absolutely no moves before the trade deadline. (Click here to see my article from 2009 on that) I am convinced that had the Capitals, instead of the Penguins, added a veteran presence in trading for Bill Guerin, we would have won that series and may have even gone to the Stanley Cup. Yet it didn’t happen.

This needs to change. We must be more aggressive. No one remembers Presidents' Trophies, and privately, I hope that McPhee understands that the 121 point regular season last year only clouded the area of need that got exposed last post-season.

Even our great philosophers understood that a successful post-season doesn’t necessarily follow a great regular season.

In his many moments of infinite wisdom, Confucius once told us that, “he who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good.” You might not know this, but directly after that, the great Chinese philosophy then wrote down that the, “difference between post-season and regular season is like difference between sharing knowledge and looking directly into a horse’s ass.” Wise man that Confucius.  

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The biggest risk we can take, is ignoring needs that can’t be ignored

When the Tampa Bay Lightning made their run to winning the Stanley Cup,  the team’s motto under coach John Tortorella was, “safety is death.” Those are wise words for McPhee to remember before he claims again that he is being responsible in not signing any pricey free agents.

As Mike Green forgot about his defensive responsibilities in the playoffs, why would you not consider getting a shutdown, stay-at-home defender, so Green can more confidently play his game? We all know John Carlson is an unbelievable talent, and this season he may show us that he is already a shutdown defenseman, but why would you not bring a veteran leader in who can perform that task right away? Furthermore, if Carlson can become that shutdown guy, what harm is there in having a number of guys who can do it, or at least play that boring, stay-at-home defense that is necessary in the playoffs. (Paging Paul Mara please)

But beyond defense, our needs go deeper. Brendan Morrison, the man considered the number two center for much of the season, was scratched for two of the seven playoff games. Eric Belanger, (the Caps actual number two center for much of our first round series with Montreal) had a whopping one assist and zero goals in the playoffs. Even Belanger though was more noticeable than Tomas Fleischmann, who McPhee seems to consider, the best option as a second center. True to his “Flash” nickname, Fleischmann was invisible in the playoffs and played so badly that in game seven he was actually scratched for marginal fourth liner, Scott Walker.

Outside of Belanger or Fleischmann, the other player McPhee seems to think might be ready for the second line center position is Mathieu Perreault. Now I like Matty P’s game, a lot. He has great speed that should allow him to have no trouble keeping up with Alexander Semin. Perreault’s passing has also improved and he should absolutely be on the roster this season. With that said, he doesn’t have the size or the skill yet to be a second line center.

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As we go through this process, I understand that the Capitals, for good reason do not want to be the Washington Redskins and go into a state of wanderlust, in exploring big time deals for anyone of "preceived" value. As the Jaromir Jagr and Michael Nylander deal’s can certainly attest to, restraint is often necessary. For certain, the Capitals are a good enough team as currently constructed, to not need that many additional free agents. The idea isn’t now to blow the house up or make a deal for the most hyped free agent under the sun, but the Caps absolutely need to add some additional pieces. Mr. McPhee, I urgently hope you read that quote at the top from Bruce about the Caps having too many “passengers.” It’s high time to bring some new people on board.