Washington wins the lottery

[txpd]

I was not trying to insult them and YES they did the right thing.
But how can anyone seriously say they'd rather have a bunch of lazy overpaid stars playing rather than a rop of hard working youngsters?
My point remains that for most of the season, the Pens had a better product than both the Rangers and Caps.
I don't think you understood my post.

I think that its worth pointing out that the Capitals collapse this season had very little to do with poor play by the expensive players on the roster. I realize that its
not trendy to defense those guys, but in the Caps case its hard for me to look at what happened with the Caps stars as being lazy overpaid stars. Lang and Gonchar were having career years, Jagr was having his best year in Washington, Bondra was right on his career averages at the time he was traded. Kolzig clearly was having problems and would be the only one of the money players that you can point a finger at. Even in his case it appears that the coaching was part of his problems as his game returned to his career levels in short order after the coaching change. His save % numbers from the start of the 04 portion of the schedule has him in the top two or three in the NHL. There was not a single Caps $$$ star player that was struggling like Alexi Kovalev was for the Rangers.

The reason the Caps lost was more that after the star players the roster was filled with too many players not capable of NHL level play. 4 of which played on defense every night. Of the few mid range players on the roster between the stars and the career minor leaguers there was an obvious failure of coaching. Konowalchuk(0 goals for Cassidy/18 goals after Cassidy), Halpern(2 goals before 17 goals after Cassidy), Willsie(0 goals before/9 goals after) Grier(1 goals before 9 goals after).

So the reason the Caps fell apart was there was just no performance at all below the star level of the team. The best way to look at this is to look at performance.
At even strenth with the marginal players were in the mix the Caps got killed. When the Caps were on the PP and used only established NHL players they were in the top 5 all season long. Strong enough that the ranking held on thru the last month of games after all the talent was traded away.

Does that make sense?

 

[txpd]

IMO the object of the game is to win the Cup...and sometimes you have to take a step(s) back to go forward....im not going to go over the whole "look who they started in goal for a few games" becasue it doesnt matter....and I think thats where you want this to go......they finished up pretty much where they were all season....

For some reason you just wont admit you grossly exaggerated figures to support an arguement

This is true. Let me also add that if you look at the caps goalie numbers. after kolzig, the caps played charpentier, the backup from last year, ouellet, a concensus can't miss goalie prospect in the raycroft class, stana, and ahl allstar with better ahl numbers than ouellet, and yeats.

when you look at the 5 to 7 games that were played each by those four goalies, you will find that ouellet and stana's results were no better than yeats and they got their games before the trade deadline when most of the stars remained. yeats games were clearly better than charpentier's in every instance. had the caps really wanted to tank the season they would have run charpy out there a lot more often.

 

[Mothra]

No, I just guessed. It doesn't matter if their salary was 50 million or 80 million, my point was the same.

Get over it.

Im fine.....you are the one upset at being wrong

 

[CapsCrazy]

Right on txpd. Good posts.