In Rowdy Series, Pressure Still on Caps

After a fake news report, a six-game suspension, an allegation of biting, and a coach being banished to a suite for turning a water bottle into a projectile against opposing fans, it is hard to imagine there being anything more unexpected in a mere first-round hockey playoff series. But there is something more unanticipated in this set of great interest now between the Rangers and Capitals. It is that the series wound up where it is scheduled to be Tuesday night -- at a deciding Game 7.

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This was not supposed to happen between the second seed in the East, the Capitals, who sport the league's best player, Alex Ovechkin, and a Rangers team that barely qualified for the postseason. This was supposed to be the Capitals' series to dominate, or cough up. Nothing has changed.

It doesn't matter that the Rangers snatched the first two games in the nation's capital. It doesn't matter that they jumped to a three-wins-to-one lead. It doesn't matter that they've lost the last two and, apparently, a lot of their composure and whatever good sense they had along the way.

The pressure still isn't on the Rangers to hold on to the advantage they built in this series in the first four games. The pressure is squarely on the Capitals to finish the near-miraculous recovery from what appeared to be first-round death.

If there is any team that is in danger of blowing this series it is the team that came into it so heavily favored.

NHL.com reported Monday that Rangers' coach John Tortorella asked reporters at the Rangers' Greenburgh, N.Y., practice facility how many of them thought his seventh-seeded club would survive to a seventh game, and few hands went up. He then asked how many thought his team had a chance of winning Tuesday night's tilt after blowing the 3-1 advantage on the short end of consecutive blowouts, and no hands went up.

"There you go," NHL.com quoted Tortorella. "There is no pressure on us. We're going to go there and try to relax and compete in a Game 7 because everybody thinks we're done."

That wasn't just coach speak from a coach who, by the way, shouldn't even be making the trip to Washington for Tuesday's contest. Excuse my digression, but how can a league with a constant image problem when it comes to gratuitous violence allow Tortorella to continue to coach in this series after firing a water bottle at Capitals fans -- no matter how boisterous and maybe profane -- and striking a female ticket-buyer in the head? That's the same sort of incident that sparked the NBA's infamous brawl between visiting Pacers and fans in Detroit. The NBA's instigator just happened to be a fan, as one might expect. The Pistons banned the main instigator from attending Pistons games forever. That's how seriously the NBA took such shenanigans.

Maybe had Tortorella's foolish act broken the orbital bone of the fan he struck, Claudette Chandonia, the league would have done the right thing and booted him for six games like it did Capitals' goon Donald Brashear on Monday for cheapshotting Rangers' penalty-killer Blair Betts and breaking his orbital bone. Betts is out. That suspension was warranted. Tortorella's slap on the wrist was not. Coaches and players cannot be allowed to attack fans no matter how outlandish they become. Leave it to ushers, security and franchises to deal with over-the-top fanatics.

But I digress.


Despite that Tortorella's team looks to be on the verge of regurgitating victory, it is the Capitals who have a lot more to cough up in this series. They have a 50-win season that netted 108 points. They have a second MVP candidacy from Ovechkin, who won the league's best-player award last season. They have Mike Green up for the Norris Trophy. They have an offense that was the third-most prolific in the league. They have a home record that appeared as stout as any until the Rangers deflated it.

In short, the Capitals have the best team they've had in over a generation, better even than the 1998 Capitals, the only team in franchise history to make it to the Stanley Cup Finals.

That team got swept on hockey's brightest stage by the Red Wings. The Capitals of '85-'86, which won 50 games and garnered 107 points, lost in the division finals to the Rangers in six games.

That's been the history of the Capitals. They've almost always come up shorter than expected. They did so last postseason when the Flyers knocked them out in a seventh game at home in the first round. Tuesday night is like 2008 all over again, when the Capitals battled back from a 3-1 deficit to the Flyers only to get eliminated on home ice by an overtime power play goal.

And now they'll have to do so without their designated tough guy, Brashear, against a team that held their offense in check early on by being physically pesky.

"He obviously has a presence on the ice and makes guys look behind them when he's on the ice," the Associated Press on Monday quoted Capitals defensemen Green. "We're all going to have to step up our game and be a little bit more physical, because we're going to be missing that key component with him out."

That is as undeniable a truth as it is no excuse.

Kevin B. Blackistone is a panelist on ESPN's Around the Horn, the Shirley Povich Chair in Sports Journalism at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, and a former award-winning sports columnist for The Dallas Morning News. He currently lives in Silver Spring, Md.