So I Heard That Strasburg Kid is Pretty Good

He was throwing a no-no before he got the hook the other day. Can't wait for that Reds series in June when he should debut at Nattos Park. Going into May the Nats are only a half game out of first and a game out of the wild card. Dunner came through in the clutch at the Wrigley matinee yesterday with the game winning homer. The Hershey Bears, how about them? Still on their way to the Calder!

Ok last night was pretty bad. The entire series was really, but game 7 was the icing on the cake. Halak was good again, but not game 6 good and very beatable. I know crazies are going to want to blow up the team, but we have to wait to get all of the information out. Something was very, very wrong this series, and I don't trust the media around DC enough with their coverage. If Portis gets a cold it leads off the evening news, but no one can seem to explain what exactly happened to the Caps. Boudreau doesn't need to go. He took over a team in disarray, led them on a miracle run to the playoffs, got knocked out by the refs the next year, and then won the President's trophy before he has had three full years. Give him another year and if a similar collapse occurs, then we need to move on. In the meantime, there is no one to replace him and I won't give up on him yet.


People are blaming Green, which is ridiculous. He didn't play great, but he is young and full of talent. That penalty last night was dumb, but a lot of guys on the team made stupid plays throughout the series. Backstrom petered off towards the end as well, Semin was more of a detriment than anything else, Fleischmann was over his head, and even Captain America Carlson who is everyone's darling was to blame on the second goal last night. (On a reverse angle of the play he gave up and it was his man who scored.) I have been for trading Semin for over a year, but we won't even get market value after his abysmal performance this series. Other than him, wholesale changes on a President's trophy team are ludicrous, something happened that we do not know about. In all seriousness the Hershey Bears do look good this year and we have an overflowing pipeline of talent coming up to an already great hockey team that just couldn't do it this year. If we are saying the same thing a year from now, we have to look elsewhere. The future is still bright, even though the present is painful. Nothing has changed since two weeks ago other than another painful loss to add to the Caps history. This chapter is done, but not the story.


Same goes for OV. Anyone that says that Crosby is clearly the best in the world now clearly knows nothing about hockey. If OV's goal isn't disallowed by an over-zealous ref, the game turns the Caps favor and we are talking about Philly now. Because that did not happen now he is a lesser player? If Semin manages to score two goals in the series after a season where he averaged a goal every other game and the Caps move on, then OV is the best again, but not right now? Come on. He was the sole focus of Montreal's stifling defense (40 plus blocked shots last night alone) and the Caps needed someone else to step up. No one else did. 3 goals in 3 games, one goal in 33 power plays is a team where no one else stepped up to supplement the team's leading scorer when he was the focus of the Habs defense. And OV has a long time to go, he isn't even 25 yet. Lemieux played 7 years before he sniffed a playoff game and he was pretty good. OV is the Barry Sanders of his league, and I'm not even ready to call Crosby any Emmit Smith. Sanders was always the better player, playoff records be damned.


This season I blogged about a lot of the injustices against the Caps; unwarranted suspensions, trumped-up steroids allegations, and league office smear campaigns and biases. Leave it to the league to tie a nice bow around the theme I was hoping would not prevail. I have the tape right here, 5:55 in, and Knuble was not in the crease on OV's called back goal until after the puck passes. Rule 78.5 disallows a goal "when an attacking player has interfered with a goalie in his goalie crease." This did not happen, Halak stretched to make the save freely and missed, and just when Verizon had started rocking without any Tom Green or Axl Rose prompting, the Caps responded legitimately. And the league all to happily took it all away without even glimpsing at a replay in a game 7 with no other games happening in the league. That would have been a different period and game, but we will never know now. It never should have come down to it in a game 7, but it did. The Caps dug their own grave, the NHL front office again was only to happy to nail shut the coffin.


I still think last year's loss to the Pens was more painful because it was a consistent fleecing by the refs. I bet Super Bowl 18 stung pretty bad, I was 3 and don't really remember, but a Lombardi from the year before probably eased the pain. But this series is one of the top 5 lowest moments in an increasingly depressing history of sports thus far in this town. But this Stasburg kid looks good.