STANLEY CUP FINALS: Capitals on the Verge of Exorcising Yet Another Demon
(Note: Game Five is being played as I post this. I finished writing it, however, before the game started.)
Every one of the Big Four sports has or has recently had its “close but no cigar” team.[1] Major League Baseball has the Texas Rangers and – until this past October – the Houston Astros. The NFL had – until this past February – the Philadelphia Eagles[2]. The NBA has the Phoenix Suns, despite the fact that they have hit the skids this decade, and the Utah Jazz. The NHL has the San Jose Sharks and the Washington Capitals, and the Caps are one win away from being the third team in the past eight months to shed the label.
Washington (DC, by the way…I can’t tell you how many people I’ve run into who think the Caps, Wizards, Redskins, and Nationals all play in the state of Washington) sports teams all have baggage. Their last championship came in the 1992 Super Bowl (1991 season), but it goes deeper than that — this is the first time ANY team from Washington has made it past the conference semifinals since the Caps got swept by the Red Wings in the 1998 Stanley Cup Finals. They have five championships total — and three belong to the Redskins. Their only World Series championship came in 1924. Their teams have lost postseason games in spectacular fashion on a fairly regular basis. (I’ll stop here before any of my DC readers start jumping en masse into the Anacostia River.) Needless to say, they’re due.
Eight years ago, the Phoenix Suns were on a great postseason run. During that stretch, Bill Simmons said in a column for ESPN that a team like the Suns needed to — and I’m paraphrasing here — slay some dragons along the way. The biggest postseasons dragons in the history of the Suns are the Bulls, Celtics, Spurs, and Lakers. The Bulls and Celtics were the teams the Suns lost to in their only NBA Finals trips. The Spurs had been the constant foil of the Seven-Seconds-or-Less Suns,[3] and the Lakers were almost always the postseason puzzle that the Suns couldn’t solve.[4] That year, they swept the Spurs in the semis and, at the time Bill wrote the column, were tied 2-2 with the Lakers in the conference finals. Bill had mentioned that getting past the Lakers would slay the second dragon, and if the Suns beat the Celtics in the NBA Finals, that would slay the third out of the four. Then the Suns lost the next two games in excruciating fashion, and the Celtics point became moot.
The Capitals are a close parallel for the Suns. Their playoff nemesis – especially in the Alex Ovechkin era – is the Pittsburgh Penguins. Going into this season, the Pens and Caps had played each other ten times in the postseason, and the Caps’ only series win was in the 1994 Conference Quarters. This season, the Caps finally removed that albatross from around their necks, even closing the series out in Pittsburgh. Now, in the Stanley Cup Finals, they face former Penguins goalie Marc-André Fleury’s new team, the Vegas Golden Knights. Vegas took Game One and looked like they would tie up Game Two late in the third — carrying momentum into overtime in front of their home fans — but Caps goalie Braden Holtby made one of the greatest saves I have seen in my 28 years watching hockey to preserve the win. That huge save seemed to further energize the Capitals, because they dominated Games Three and Four in Washington. Will the Capitals win one more and reach the Promised Land, or will they blow yet another 3-1 lead? With this hungry team having slain as many dragons (as Bill Simmons would put it), my prediction is the former, but I predict that it will happen Sunday night in Washington. Caps in six.
Thursday, June 7, 2018, 4:58 pm MST
[1] By this, I mean teams who make the postseason regularly but still have never won a title, usually flaming out in spectacular fashion.
[2] The Eagles won the NFL title in 1960, but this was their first Super Bowl championship.
[3] In the 21st Century, the Spurs had knocked the Suns out of the playoff all four times that they had faced them up to that point: Six games in the ’03 Conference Quarters, five games in the ’05 Conference Finals, six games in the infamous ’07 Conference Finals (Tim Donaghy/Robert Horry), and five games in the ’08 Conference Quarters.
[4] Here is a list of every Suns-Lakers playoff series: 1970 Conf. Semis, 4-3 Lakers, with the Suns blowing a 3-1 lead; 1980 Conf. Semis, 4-1 Lakers; 1982 Conf. Semis, 4-0 Lakers; 1984 Conf. Finals, 4-2 Lakers; 1985 Conf. Quarters, 3-0 Lakers; 1989 Conf. Finals, 4-0 Lakers; 1990 Conf. Semis, 4-1 Suns; 1993 Conf. Quarters, 3-2 Suns, coming back from a 2-0 deficit after losing the first two games at home; 2000 Conf. Semis, 4-1 Lakers; 2006 Conf. Quarters, 4-3 Suns, coming back from a 3-1 deficit; 2007 Conf. Quarters, 4-1 Suns. Out of 11 playoff series, the Suns had only beaten them four times. Three were in the first round and one was in the second. The Suns had NEVER beaten the Lakers in a Conference Finals series.
