The Washington Capitals announced yesterday that they were prepared to stand pat with the team they had entering the season, and it all sounded so reasonable and believable.
Year after year, George McPhee presents bland platitudes about the team's happiness with its current assets. Year after year he holds up a poker face so strong that the team's fans call him "The Undertaker."
Yesterday, McPhee announced that the club was ready for the year with the additions of Joel Ward, Jeff Halpern and Roman Hamrlik. And I wrote that something big was still likely to happen.
Well, one day with the new blog and already I've been really, really right about something.
The Caps just signed the best goalie available this summer. Tomas Vokoun had an almost winning record playing for a team so bad it has to spend twenty million dollars this summer just to get to the salary-floor.
The last goalie to succeed with the Florida Panthers just carried the Vancouver Canucks to the Stanley Cup Finals, where he held the Bruins to seven games.
The Capitals are lucky to pick up Vokoun, not only because he's incredibly good at blocking pucks and helping teams win, but because every journalist in hockey had prematurely awarded him to the Colorado Avalanche, who finished twenty-ninth in the league last year because they didn't have a good goalie.
A week ago, the Caps traded one of their two young, unproven goaltenders to the Avalanche for a first round draft pick that, if the Avalanche don't get any better this year, will be a second overall choice. And now suddenly the Caps also wind up with better goaltending than the Avalanche for the coming season.
This is going to be a very exciting year to be a Caps fan
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