So the Caps have talked a whole lot recently about taking these final nine…eight…seven…six games of the regular season seriously. We’ve had at least a half-dozen of them mention the team’s sluggish end to the 2009 season and the corresponding slow start in the Stanley Cup playoff series against the Rangers. Nicklas Backstrom was the latest to bring that up after the overtime loss to Ottawa on Tuesday.
To a certain extent, the Caps are fighting human nature here as much as the other team. In the three recent losses – where they have been outscored a combined 9-1 in the first period – Washington has simply not matched the effort of the opposition early on. In all three games it fought back, though in the Calgary game on Sunday, a 5-3 loss, the Caps never cut the deficit to a single goal.
So what’s the problem? Bruce Boudreau had a theory after practice earlier this week – even before the slow start against Ottawa.
“I think it’s my job to make sure they don’t fall. And it’s a tough thing because they’ve won the conference. The coaches can tell them all they want. The example I’m using is if you remember going to school and you have a project due in two weeks…your parents are saying ‘You’ve got to start working on this thing right away. You can’t leave it to the last minute.’ And in your head you know when you can leave it to. No matter what they’re saying…you know when the last possible moment is. And I think there’s a lot of that in it. We can tell them ‘Hey, [the playoffs are] two weeks away. We got to get going now.’ But they know. Some of them will think it’s two weeks away, some of them will say ‘Hey, I’m playing just not to get hurt.’ And it’s not what we want. But it’s a mindset of people. And I understand that mindset.”
Defenseman Mike Green also made the obligatory reference to the Rangers series, where the Caps trailed 2-0 and eventually 3-1 before clawing their way to a Game 7 victory. The contrasts between the last two seasons and the end of 2007-08, when the Caps had to win 11 of 12 to even make the playoffs, is obvious. Then again – they lost that series to Philadelphia, too. So maybe we make far too much of all this.
“It’s definitely a different mindframe,” Green said. “We’ve been in the position where we’re a desperate hockey team fighting for a playoff spot. And it’s definitely a different atmosphere. But I know when we were the team fighting for a playoff spot and finally it comes down to the last game and we get into the playoffs, maybe we were a little mentally drained just because we’d been so focused. And right now we’ve got to stay into it. But it’s also good that we don’t have to mentally drain ourselves before the playoffs.”
