Reading the comments a few Caps fans post on message boards and news outlets, it's hard to tell which direction the Caps should have taken this summer. Everyone agreed that the team needed to add more players who perform well in the playoffs. The Caps have already shown they can win the regular season, goes the mantra. Now they need guys who are best at the playoffs.
To a lot of fans, this means getting rid of European guys who score lots of points in the regular season and picking up guys born in North America who measure their regular seasons in bruises instead of goals and assists. This sort of silly jingoism doesn't actually stand up to even a cursory look at the numbers.
In order, here are the players who have had the best single-season playoff scoring totals in Washington Capitals history: Alex Ovechkin, John Druce, Joey Juneau, Adam Oates, Nicklas Backstrom, Alexander Semin, Andrei Nikolishin, Brian Bellows, Geoff Courtnall, Michal Pivonka. While that list is 50% North American, the team, like the league, has almost always been well over 50% North American. Most of the significant European players in Caps history are represented. In fact, the two crucial European players you don't see, Bengt Gustafson and Peter Bondra, are eleventh and twelfth.
More importantly, all of the key European scorers on the Caps right now are represented in the top six, each scoring above all but two guys from the 1998 team that made the Cup Finals. While we're at it, those two guys--Adam Oates and Joey Juneau--aren't exactly the prototypical North American power forwards and role players that some of the club's most vocal fans keep claiming help you win playoff games.
Between the unpronounceable name, the spin moves and the pass-first mentality, Juneau could be an honorary European. Speaking of pass-first mentalities, Oates performed his dazzling feats of stickhandling and play-making in Washington to regular chants of "Shoot The Puck!" While Oates is a nice, easy to pronounce name, that didn't really translate to a hard-nosed presence in front of the net. Oates was a six-time finalist for the Lady Byng award as one of hockey's most gentlemanly players.
Both Oates and Juneau graduated from a prestigious engineering school, and each was capable of doing the math on how to help a team succeed without paying a physical price. Opposing players would often acknowledge in interviews that there was no point hitting Oates because he never took shots and he never hit anybody unless he absolutely had to. This all flies in the face of everything hockey apparently stands for, but when the Stanley Cup was on the line, Oates and Juneau put up more points than beloved cementheads like Dale Hunter, Dino Cicciarelli, Kevin Hatcher or even Hall of Famers like Scott Stevens and Mike Gartner.
In fact, while Courtnall and Bellows were certainly more comfortable with a little bit of contact than the RPI nerds who outscored them when it mattered, they each had their share of speed and skill as well. The only true "power forward" on the list is John Druce.
Druce is a folk hero around here, a gritty role-player who elevated his game in 1990 to carry the Capitals almost single-handedly to the conference finals. In fifteen playoff games that year, Druce destroyed opposing goaltenders for fourteen goals and three assists. At the same time, he scuffled his way to twenty-three penalty minutes. Never an offensive force before or since, Druce captivated our imaginations with a few weeks of incredible goal-scoring, brought the Capitals to their first unsuccessful conference final and became a larger-than-life figure.
I think John Druce is the reason some Caps fans overlook the other eleven players in that top twelve. We saw in 1990 that a tough team where one guy suddenly, magically, becomes unstoppable can get pretty far in the playoffs. In the Caps other playoff runs their play may have been prettier and faster, but its explanation was more logical, and therefore less memorable. Druce fans are the people you see asking again and again for the team to trade Semin, owner of the franchise's sixth-best playoff performance ever and a commensurately skilled hockey player, trade Backstrom who holds its fifth-best postseason mark or trade Ovechkin who didn't impress anybody when he broke Druce's team record because we all knew knew he could do it.
The only Caps star who's not on that list is Mike Green. Mike Green, in fact, isn't even in the top five of a single-season playoff scoring chart for Capitals named Mike. The only North American born offensive dynamo on the current squad, Green falls behind two solid seasons by Gartner (16th, 29th) and three by Mike Ridley (20th, 23rd and 27th) on that list. If Caps fans are looking to get rid of offensive stars who fall apart in the post-season, it's very strange that they tend to name Alexander Semin more often than Mike Green, whose top season of nine points ranks at 42nd on the team's all-time list, and is only one point ahead of Semin's second-best offseason.
Obviously, the Caps have been wise not to get rid of Mike Green. The type of offense he can bring is very difficult to replicate at all from a blueliner, let alone at a price like his. In the last year of a four-year contract over which league salaries have increased by a huge margin, Green provides great value even if he isn't quite a superstar anymore. But the other important thing to notice about the last year of a contract is that Green's got more motivation to perform this year than in the last few, so maybe he will start to look like a superstar again.
Of course, the Caps have also wisely recognized this offseason that a Druce-like player would really help them succeed. Enter Joel Ward who just went from total anonymity to national heroism after posting thirteen points over twelve games in just his second NHL postseason. Ward has shown he can have the same kind of explosive breakout year as Druce when it counts, in pursuit of a championship.
Now lets just hope he can follow up on his star turn better than Druce, who went on to average 1 point per season in six more playoff years with Washington and Philadelphia. With six points in his last thirty-seven playoff matches, John Druce should really make us hope Joel Ward is no John Druce. Given that Ward managed four points in six games in 2010, he's already a lot more consistent than Druce, so we have good reason to hope, in spite of their similarities.
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