With about five minutes left in Monday’s 4-3 victory over the Phoenix Coyotes, Capitals forward Alex Semin made a slow walk through the Verizon Center press box six stories above the ice to the bank of elevators that would take him to the locker room. Instead of a jersey he was wearing a suit and a toque. Instead of contributing to the win he was watching it.
It’s not a position Semin is used to. He was last scratched during the 2003-04 season when he was just a 19-year-old rookie far from home adjusting to life in the NHL. But his well-documented struggles in recent weeks – the lack of goals, the daily penalties – finally forced Caps coach Bruce Boudreau to bench his struggling winger. It was a shift here and there earlier in the season. Then it was almost an entire period in a Nov. 11 game against the New Jersey Devils. Now, the most drastic step of all: the healthy scratch. Why now?
“We’ve talked about it. I guess the talk has gone away from it because we were starting to lose,” Washington coach Bruce Boudreau said. “We’ve scratched guys. He’s taken penalties seven games in a row. At some point you have to be accountable for your errors. I don’t like doing those things to people that are that talented, but everybody’s got to know that everybody’s accountable. So it was a tough decision but it was the decision I thought that had to be made for the group.”
That theme has run throughout the Caps’ season. It was the lynchpin of management’s meetings over the summer with key returning veterans, including Brooks Laich, who as a free agent could have signed somewhere else if he felt the culture wasn’t in place to win a Stanley Cup. Some players – Alex Ovechkin to Yahoo!’s Greg Wyshynski, John Carlson – didn’t want to comment on Semin’s absence. Ovechkin, especially, has taken pains over the years to defend his friend when the ire of coaches, fans and media descends upon him – as it is once more.
“That’s pro sports. When things aren’t going well there’s going to be a change or there’s going to be some sort of adjustment,” veteran winger Mike Knuble said. “It’s a chance for other people to play a lot more. It’s a spot open on a power play. It’s a spot for other people to come up try and play a little bit more. It can goose your whole team a little bit by somebody being out. Couple guys move around and try to play a little bit harder. A number of messages being sent, I guess, so far.”
Added rookie Cody Eakin, who wasn’t around for the playoff failures of recent years: “It’s a message and it could be you at any point. You’ve got to fight for the spot you want to earn.”
Washington general manager George McPhee would like nothing more than to have his contributing rookies – Eakin, defenseman Dmitry Orlov, even second-year players like Marcus Johansson – come of age in that kind of culture. The very best organizations thrive on it and because the Caps haven’t won anything yet in the spring they are still searching. Is it in them? Is it in Semin? He now must rebound from this public rebuke – if Boudreau gives him the chance on Wednesday against Winnipeg.
“He’s a proud person,” Knuble said of Semin. “Nobody who plays in the National Hockey League likes to be sat out and made an example of in that way. Probably expect a little bit better play. I don’t know. I guess you have to see when he gets out there. But nobody likes that. No player likes that.”
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