Waiting for greatness of No. 8
To say Marcel Dionne lives with a chip on his shoulder would be wrong. The hall-of-fame goal-scoring savant is excellent company, quick to laugh and always happy to share old hockey stories.
And, at age 65, he has lived his share. When Dionne played his last game in 1989, his 684 career goals ranked second behind only Gordie Howe.
But certainly Dionne is well aware of his status as the most prolific scorer in NHL history to never win a Stanley Cup. Heck, none of the teams Dionne headlined ever got out of the second round. So if Dionne doesn’t live with a chip on his shoulder, he resides with a retort at the ready.
“Hey, I was never the general manager,” Dionne shrugged a while back, talking over coffee at the Blue Line Diner, his popular restaurant in Niagara Falls, Ont.
That would be one way for Alex Ovechkin to assess his career’s glaring shortcoming should the Washington Capitals not escape from the 3-1 series hole in which they reside heading into Saturday night’s Game 5 of their second-round playoff series with the Pittsburgh Penguins. Individual players can’t win team awards, let alone assemble championship rosters. So an individual player can’t possibly wear a team’s chronic failure.
Still, Ovechkin does wear Washington’s “C.” And Friday’s news from Capitals practice wasn’t exactly an endorsement of the Great 8’s bona fides as a crunch-time performer.
On the day before one of the biggest games of Ovechkin’s career, it says something that he found himself skating with his team’s third line. Barry Trotz, the Capitals coach, insisted to reporters that Ovechkin, a first-line winger since he arrived in Washington, was not being demoted. Trotz spoke of the need to get Ovechkin reps with the third unit, centred by Lars Eller and flanked by Tom Wilson. The Capitals, Trotz said, may need to double-shift Ovechkin in Saturday’s game.
But there is no denying Ovechkin wasn’t very good in Wednesday’s Game 4, when he was held without a point in about 20 minutes of ice time as the Penguins, playing without the concussed Sidney Crosby, earned a 3-2 win. Ovechkin, who has one goal in the series, acknowledged his poor effort. Trotz called out his top players. And if the honest assessments were a valiant touch, the predicament is ugly. Teams down 3-1 in best-of-seven NHL series historically advance about 10 per cent of the time. One assumes Washington’s chances won’t be improved if Crosby, who practised Friday but was noncommittal about his status, is back in the lineup on Saturday.
If Ovechkin ends yet another season without an appearance in so much as a conference final, he’ll maintain membership in an exclu- sive club. In the pantheon of great goal scorers, after all, few have been as synonymous with playoff underachievement as the Capitals star. Ovechkin, easily the greatest scorer of his dead-puck generation, sits 26th on the all-time NHL goal list. Only five players who have scored more have failed to win a Stanley Cup — Mats Sundin (23rd), Dino Ciccarelli (18th), Jarome Iginla (15th), Mike Gartner (seventh) and Dionne (now fifth).
Of that group, only Sundin and Dionne never played in a Cup final. And only Dionne, like Ovechkin to date, never played beyond the second round.
Still, if Dionne can rest comfortably in his accomplishments, he has solid reasons. In the 11 full seasons Dionne played with the L.A. Kings, for instance, the Kings finished 10th overall or worse eight times. Compare that to the Ovechkin-era Capitals. In the most recent 10 seasons beginning in 2007-08, when they first made the playoffs, the Capitals have finished first overall three times. And over that span only one franchise has compiled more regular-season points. That’d be the Penguins, they of the two Crosbyera Stanley Cup wins. (And it’s here that Capitals fans can curse the NHL for devising a ridiculous division-based playoff format pitting the teams with this season’s two best regular-season records against each other in the second round).
Washington’s historically poor record in potential post-season closeout games is well documented. A first-round Game 6 win over the Maple Leafs marked just the sixth time in 21 tries the Ovechkin-era Capitals made good on a chance to clinch a best-of-seven series. Ovechkin has scored just six goals in those 21 games — or about 0.3 a game, half his regular-season average.
The Capitals have been slightly better when facing elimination — 10-8 in the Ovechkin era. And Ovechkin hasn’t exactly underperformed in such contests, scoring nine goals, an average of 0.5 a game.
Still, he’s been held scoreless in 10 of those contests. And he’s managed more than one goal in just one of them. No one is saying Washington’s failure is all on Ovechkin.
He’s a surefire Hall-of-Famer no matter what, a three-time MVP, a six-time winner of the Rocket Richard Trophy as the league’s top goal getter. He’s not the general manager. He’s certainly not Nicklas Backstrom, Washington’s top pointgetter this season, who was also largely invisible in Game 4, held pointless without a shot on goal. And hockey is not basketball. Nobody dominates every night. But great hockey players tend to dominate every now and then, especially when it matters.
As Trotz told reporters Friday: “The bottom line is we’re going to need him to be really good. So he’s got to respond this next game and be a difference-maker for us.”
To say the Great 8 is overdue to overachieve in an outsized moment would be an understatement.