Tuesday Roundup

A little more than a week ago, Caps Assistant GM Don Fishman (a.k.a. possessor of perhaps my safest-for-work dream job) sat down with a group of season ticket holders for some "Chalk Talk," a team-hosted Q&A with a member of the organization.

Fishman was surprisingly candid about the team's salary cap situation - the Caps, at that point, were $190,000 below the $56.7 million ceiling. Not $305,000 below or $668,899 below, but $190,000 below.

So what does $190,000 get you in the NHL these days? Well, it'll get you about 55 days (not games, but days) of Chris Bourque or 50 days of Sami Lepisto or or 43 days of Simeon Varlamov or 21 days of Karl Alzner (or three days of Alex Ovechkin).

It'll also get you saving money wherever you can. For example, perusing the AHL transactions page, I noticed this:

Click to enlarge

A couple of paper transactions and $5,107.53 saved? Perhaps - every penny counts (note, too, that the team wasn't exactly broadcasting their moves either - the October 31 press release on Sloan's demotion noted that "Sloan, 27, returns to Hershey after being recalled by the Caps on Oct. 20."). [Update: see the comments for why the cap probably isn't why this was going on, though the underlying point remains]

So things are tight. Damn tight. And remember, teams have to leave some room for short-term injury replacements (i.e. if another defenseman goes down with a day-to-day injury and the team calls up Lepisto, they do so at $3,763.44 per day against the cap while the guy he's replacing is also still counting against the cap).

In other words, barring some serious salary cap shedding, this is the team the Caps will be going with the rest of the way. That $4 million right wing or blueliner you were hoping for at the deadline for a prospect and a pick? Don't count on it - if the Caps are at $190k below the cap at the deadline, they'll only be able to afford about nine days of a player at that salary.

Which brings us to King Karl. To make it easy, let's assume the Caps stay where they are vis a vis the cap and team health, and that they're going to send down Tyler Sloan to make room for Alzner and that they're willing to bump right up against the cap (which is unrealistic because of injuries, as noted before). The earliest it could possibly happen? March 13, give or take a day.

Like I said, these are your 2008-09 Caps - hope you like 'em.

Elsewhere 'Round the Rinks:

If you didn't catch this story on former Caps prospect Robert Mueller yesterday, make sure to now.... At least the Caps made Ryan Getzlaf's day suck a little more back in 2003 (and look - an article about that 2003 Entry Draft that mentions Eric Fehr, though not in the context of "impact players").... Somehow Alex Semin is losing All-Star votes. You can't pin this one on Sarah Palin, elitist liberal media!... A couple of power rankings from yesterday, where the Caps are up two to seventh at CBSSports.com and up three to sixth at The Hockey News (where they refer to Jose Theodore as either an emergency contraceptive pill or a Huey Lewis & The News album - and I'm not sure which is worse).... Wait, I thought it was Ovechkin, not Nicklas Backstrom, who folks thought resembled the Geico caveman.... Thanks to sk8 for passing along this article on John Erskine.... Want to know how Ben Clymer ended up in Minsk? I mean, other than by being a sub-NHL caliber hockey player? He's happy to tell you.... Finally, for the fan who needs all of his (or her) Carrie Milbank pictures in one place, there's this (thanks, Phil, from all of us).

Where's This Stuff In "The Code?"

A couple of weeks ago, Columbus Blue Jackets blueliner Ole-Kristian Tollefsen caught Leafs forward Jason Blake skating out of his defensive zone with his head down and made him pay for his mistake, one that a guy who has been in the League as long as Blake has (or for any amount of time, for that matter) should never have made.

Tollefsen absolutely crushed Blake, and did so well within the rules of the game (hockey is, after all, a contact sport), and yet the reaction it elicited from Blake's teammates was predictable: someone had to fight the nasty Norweigian, and pronto (unfortunately for Alexei Ponikarovsky, he was the guy left to challenge the much more seasoned fighter):

There are a couple of ways to look at these events, and I'm not entirely sure they're mutually exclusive. The first is to praise "Poni" for defending his still-writhing teammate. The second is to ask, "When the hell did clean hits start commanding a response like that?"

The latter was my reaction at the time (as you can see in the comments here), and was my reaction last night when Rene Bourque jumped Tyler Sloan after Sloan lit up Daymond Langkow:

I wasn't going to harp on it any more, but I caught Ken Campbell's post on the topic this afternoon, and thought it worth passing along. Campbell writes:

This is getting ridiculous. How do you expect to have hitting in the game when the player delivering a clean hit has to worry about being jumped and pummeled by some idiot who is hell-bent on revenge? No matter what you think about fighting in hockey, the increasing number of fights that come on the heels of clean hits are ridiculous.

After all, aren’t enforcers – and all players for that matter - supposed to live by "the code?" Nobody has ever fully explained "the code" to me, but I have to think part of it suggests these guys are all man enough to pick themselves up after a clean hit. These boneheads justify what they do by saying that you can’t allow guys to "take liberties" with your top players.

Whaaa? Exactly where in the NHL rulebook does it state that good players are immune from clean hits? You’re not supposed to let the other team score goals either, but you don’t start jumping on your opponents and beat them every time your team is scored on.

Spot on, Kenny Boy (and killer use of "whaaa?").

Now, in fairness, the situation hasn't yet arisen (knock wood) where it's one of "my guys" lying in a heap on the ice, and I'm sure that my initial reaction will be to want the head of the thug who lays out Alex Semin on a pike, even if the hit was clean. But at the same time, the overwhelming thought in my head will be "he should have had his head up - he knows better."

Campbell's piece is definitely worth a read, and I'll let him wrap this post up as he did his own, relating the events surrounding a recent big-hit-turned-donnybrook involving Kurt Sauer levelling Andrei Kostitsyn (the hit itself was questionable, so the fight that followed was understandable... but this reaction wasn't):

[A]fter the game, Georges Laraque of the Canadiens said it doesn’t matter if a hit is "clean or dirty," somebody has to take on Sauer in that situation.

The only problem is, that kind of attitude runs counter to everything that’s noble in hockey. Yes, it does matter if the hit is clean. It’s part of the game, just like scoring goals and killing penalties.

If NHL players are going to hold themselves up as the standard bearers of internal fortitude and honor, maybe they should start acting as thought they really believe it.

Take the hit and move on.

Update: Here's Bourque on his hit and the aftermath:

"I wasn't happy with the amount of penalty minutes I'd got. I'd never seen a nine-minute powerplay before, and if I knew that would be the case, I wouldn't have done what I'd done.

...

Bourque said Sloan's check wasn't dirty, "just hard" so he didn't think twice about going after the Capitals defenceman.

Idiocy. Pure idiocy (and clear evidence that it's up to the refs - not the players - to get this crap under control).