Sunday is the final day of the NHL regular season.
Now begins what the Washington Capitals — and their fans — have been waiting for since April 28, 2010, when the Capitals were stunned in a Game 7 loss to the eight-seeded Montreal Canadiens.
It was not just an upset. It was a collapse, the first time a top seed blew a 3-1 series lead to an eighth seed.
Ever since then, the taste of that loss has been in the mouths of everyone connected with the Capitals and nothing that has happened since has gotten rid of that taste.
Now questions were being raised about this young, talented, star-studded team, its superstar Alex Ovechkin and lovable coach Bruce Boudreau.
And even though the Capitals have turned in yet another impressive regular-season performance this year — even though it was a little rockier path — those questions still have not been answered.
Can Ovechkin do what other great players have done before him — like his rival Sidney Crosby did two years ago — lead his team to a Stanley Cup championship?
Can Boudreau — whose playoff record in Washington is 13-15 — push the right buttons in the heated atmosphere of a playoff series?
Ovechkin’s stats are down this season with only 32 goals and 85 points entering Saturday’s regular-season finale, compared to 50 goals and 109 points last year. But Ovechkin seems to have made the same adjustments as his team to become a more defensive, playoff-style unit. And Boudreau is coming off a year where his team struggled at times like it never had before — the eight-game losing streak in December being one of several bad stretches of play. But he appears to have transformed this team from a flashy offensive show into more of a grinding, defensive squad ready to pay the price to play playoff hockey.
That was the whole purpose of this season — to change the way the Washington Capitals play. It was almost as if the regular season was one, long exhibition season — a sentence the Caps and their fans had to suffer through.
The Capitals won their fourth straight Southeast Division title, but if they exit the Stanley Cup playoffs early again, those division banners hanging from Verizon Center become the same joke that the Mystics’ attendance banners used to be.
After all, we are talking about an exhibition season for the Capitals, where the point of every game of this 82-game season was to get ready for a shot at redemption.
Examiner columnist Thom Loverro is the co-host of “The Sports Fix” from noon to 2 p.m. Monday through Friday on ESPN980 and espn980.com. Contact him at [email protected].
