Washington Capitals at Game 70+

The fans feel it in the air. Its a passion for hockey in the swamp also known as DC. You can feel it everywhere and it certainly isn't always positive, yet here we find the team at the seventy plus game mark with only 27 wins on the season. Not good enough, not nearly. But fear not fans the executive management team has a plan. It might be a foolish one, but its far better to make a mistake than to make no decision at all.

After all prospects are suspects until they make the show. Yet some players must make the show and the hope is that the team has a few of them. The Capitals have acquired quite a few higher end young players with good upside, the question is will they reach that potential. After all its a gamble to take any young man and his possibilities. Especially a grinding career of playing hockey at the NHL level places even more pressure on these guys. We can only hope to win a parley or two and have the problem of having too many players on the roster in a season or three.

This won't be the first sim league we have followed this path. We have a long track record of doing a fairly good job of assessing talent. Fortunately we didn't end up with the Penguins, because their prospect pool is perhaps the worst in the league. The team has two first round picks in this years draft and three in next years draft. That is 5 shots at the dart board. About a decade ago I cut all other sports to just focus on hockey. That is what we do here on the Pacific coast of Japan. Read, watch, chat and learn about the sport. Everyone has a hobby, hockey is mine.

Besides the marginally adequate Capitals prospect pool featuring such names as Suzdalev, Trineyev. Connor McMichael, Clay Stevenson, Hendrix Lappiere, Ivan Miroschnichenko, Ryan Chesley and Vincent Iorio the “experts” making the decisions have added; Danila Yurov, Liam Ohgren, Albert Johansson and Gleb Trikozov. A clear heavy emphasis on Russian players but we don't discriminate against any country and welcome any player who can lace up the skates for our team.

Will players such as Max Jones, Rasmus Kupari, Connor McMichael, David Gustafsson and Alex Beaucage reach their full potential ? Will players such as Kevin Labanc, Anthony Mantha not suck so badly ? Its hard to say and only time will tell. We do know that Tim Stutzle, Nicolas Hague, and Martin Fehevary are the blocks upon which we are building a franchise.

Our operating paradigm is to repeat the mantra “the only way out is not the way you came in”. The fans clearly didn't deserve such a horrendous season but stick with us boys and girls. Things can only get better right ? After all they can hardly get worse. We will carry on for a long time and have no plans of bailing on the process, its what motivates us almost daily.