Washington Capitals 2013 Off-season

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The Washington Capitals once again got bounced from the playoffs before Memorial Day, leaving the DC faithful to wonder how a team with the best sniper in the world can consistently struggle to find postseason success. I've always maintained that the idea of being clutch or choking in the playoffs is largely an effect of luck and circumstance, but as the sample size of Caps failures increases I am left to wonder if that's just wishful thinking on my part.

More like "FAN OF THE DECADE".

The season wasn't a total loss. New head coach Adam Oates started off on the wrong foot (2-8-1) but after some lineup juggling he righted the ship and led Washington to its fifth division title in six years. Alexander Ovechkin's transition from left wing to right wing also took a while to get settled, but it resulted in Ovie's third Hart Memorial Trophy and third Maurice "Rocket" Richard Trophy. Despite another year of playoff futility, it's important to remember that the major contributors still have plenty of good hockey in front of them. Brooks Laich is the elder statesman at 30 years old, Mike Green and Ovechkin are 28, and Nicklas Backstrom is 26. Karl Alzner, John Carlson, Braden Holtby, and Marcus Johansson are younger still. The point is Washington still has a lot of juice left in the tank to make a substantial run at the Stanley Cup Finals.

Before I get underway, I'll offer the same public service announcement I did last season: Please check out the following websites for a much more informed and detailed account of the Capitals and hockey in general.

• Japers' Rink, the top Capitals community with daily links and intelligent discussions
• Russian Machine Never Breaks, my favorite Caps blog with a dash of humor
• Chris Gordon, reporter and photographer for RMNB
• sk84fun_dc, Japers' poster with tons of knowledge about Caps prospects
• CapGeek.com, the only source for anything about the salary cap
• Hockey Prospectus, not as complete as its baseball counterpart, but plenty of good info
• Hockey-Reference.com and Hockeydb.com, good sites for stats
• Hockey's Future and Elite Prospects, for all your prospect needs

-- Front Office --

In his quest to build a contender in Washington, general manager George McPhee has never shied away from trimming the fat off the 50-man roster. Following the lockout, he waived Roman Hamrlik after it was evident the aging defenseman was out of shape and ineffective, and the New York Rangers did the Caps a solid by claiming him. He chose not to sign projects like Mattias Sjogren and Steffen Soberg, and has taken a lot of NCAA prospects recently in order to add a few years to their signing window. Now in the midst of training camp, the Caps have 46 players under NHL contracts, which gives them a little room to sign cheap free agents or make NHL-level trades over the course of the season.

"Yay! I still have a job!"

To his credit, McPhee has resisted the urge to blow up the core roster despite six straight early playoff exits. The biggest loss, allowing Alexander Semin to leave via unrestricted free agency, was necessary due to the uncertain nature of the salary cap under the new collective bargaining agreement. McPhee was able to acquire Mike Ribeiro to fill the scoring void left by Semin, and hopefully Mikhail Grabovski (or eventually Tom Wilson, Evgeny Kuznetsov, or Andre Burakovsky) will do the same. But keeping Ovechkin, Backstrom, Green, Laich, and more recently Carlson and Alzner together indicates that he will never hit the panic button and do something to harm the team's long-term fortunes. McPhee's one historic weakness may have been to solidify the goalie position, as the post-Olaf Kolzig era has seen its share of hits and misses. But with Holtby now solidly in control of the starter's job, the whole roster may have the stability needed for a deep playoff run.

We'll get to the coaches and the players after the jump...

Civilization V: Gods & Kings - Rome

In a previous post, I commented that I got bored with Civilization V rather quickly. I found the replay value to be lacking because it seemed like there just wasn't enough to do. You build, you go to war, and most of the time you win. At the higher difficulty levels, there just weren't enough ways to get around the advantages the of the computer-controlled players. But with the Gods & Kings expansion, it added not only a new religion mechanic, but added more of everything to make gameplay more varied. In the past few months, I've been playing it a lot, and the "one more turn" addiction has taken hold of me once more. I want to experience as much of the game as possibly before buying the brand new expansion, Brave New World, which changes culture entirely and adds a new tourism mechanic.

With that in mind, I'm going to be recapping some recent games I've played. I hope you enjoy them, I know I did.


ROME - AUGUSTUS CAESAR

Unique Ability: The Glory of Rome (+25% Production towards any buildings that already exist in the Capital)

Unique Unit: Ballista (+1 Combat Strength and +2 Ranged Combat Strength over Catapult, which it replaces)

Unique Unit: Legion (ability to build roads and forts, +3 Combat Strength over Swordsman, which it replaces)

Map Size: Standard (8 civilizations, 16 city-states)
Map Type: Continents
Difficulty: King (5)
Pace: Standard

The Romans are pretty great for an "infinite city sprawl" (ICS) strategy since any building that exists in Rome is built much faster in every other city in your civilization. In other words, you can build tall and wide with Rome. The problem becomes managing your gold and happiness, as lacking in either will give the computer players a big advantage, especially on King difficulty. My strategy is to build tall at first, then go wide when I can afford happiness and science buildings. A domination victory is difficult because you need science to research new units, gold to keep them upgraded, and happiness to offset the penalty of conquering cities. If anyone can do it, it's Caesar. (Well, him and Napoleon, but I don't like the French.)

I didn't take screenshots during the actual game, but I will try to tell the story of my victory through the replay maps.

 

Turn 1: I found Rome, one turn later than everyone else founded their capital, in the northwestern part of the eastern continent. To my east the Netherlands are light orange and white, to the south the Incas are gold and green, and finally on the extreme other end of the continent the English are burgundy and white. The western continent has the Polynesians in orange and white, the Spanish in dark red and pink, the Egyptians in yellow and purple, and the Austrians in red and white. All of the black territories are city-states. This is a good starting location because I have a nice buffer between Rome and London. Queen Elizabeth I can be very aggressive with expansion and military strength, so I wouldn't want to go to war with her until adequately prepared.

Of course, I don't know any of this. All I know is that Rome got lucky by starting on a hill next to a river, with wine and marble nearby. Marble is especially nice since it provides the same happiness as other luxuries in addition to speeding up wonder construction.

More after the jump...

Review: Final Fantasy XII

After my review of Final Fantasy XIII-2, I theorized that it wouldn't be long before we saw another direct sequel. Turns out I was right. But since that experience left me battered and bruised emotionally, I decided rather than wait for the (hopefully) final installment of the saga of the Farron sisters, I would go through older Final Fantasy titles in order to remind myself of why I enjoy them so much in the first place. My recent reviews of The Legend of Zelda franchise have moved forward down the official Zelda timeline. In the Final Fantasy series, however, the settings are completely separate worlds with no chronological order, giving me no clear direction with which to work. But I figured it would just be easiest to go in reverse order of the release of the major installments. Plus, if I went down that road, the next game up contained that one superboss I could never get to... Therefore, I hooked up my old PlayStation 2 slimline and returned to the world of Ivalice and Final Fantasy XII.

Oh, yeah! It's my old friends, Swashbuckler and Bunnytits!

In the six years and change since I bought XII on the day it was released (I even shelled out the extra dough for the Collector's Edition!) I had yet to visit the final dungeon. It seems strange that I never finished a game that I enjoyed playing, even if it wasn't my favorite title in the series. It's just that the dungeon right before the end is about one hundred floors, and the game's real challenges stem from defeating optional bosses and acquiring rare items which have nothing to do with the main storyline. Speaking of, this is also the point in the story when things start to go a little batshit insane, although I do have to give the developers credit for not tacking on some needless trip to outer space (spoiler alert!) or something equally stupid. But in the interest of completion, I finally beat the last boss, watched the end credits, and now I can safely say that I wish I had never gone back to this game.

I should have left you under the TV stand, covered in dust. :-(

More after the jump...

Florida Panthers at Washington Capitals: 9 February 2013

Last year, my friend asked me to go with him to see Florida and Washington square off at the Verizon Center, where I enjoyed braided pretzels and a dominating Capitals win. Exactly 368 days later, that same friend couldn't use his tickets and offered them both to me and my fiancée, in exchange for two signed pucks being offered at a team charity event. So we got there early, got in line for the pucks, and while we weren't lucky enough to get one of the five blank pucks to be signed by Nicklas Backstrom after the game, we did get four very good ones.

Left to right: Marcus Johansson, Joel Ward, Eric Fehr, Mike Green. Awesome.

Mike Green was an especially good get for me, since my friend already had one of his from the last charity event, and he's been one of my favorite Caps for years. My friend called dibs on Ward and Fehr, so now I'm really hoping MoJo doesn't get traded any time soon.

As for the game, I was less than optimistic. Sure, the Caps have owned the Cats at home in recent memory. But Washington opened the season 2-8-1, one of their worst starts in franchise history. In fact I had just written a lengthy rant on my favorite online forum BlueGartr on what was wrong with the Caps. Not only that, they were coming off an embarrassing loss to Pittsburgh where they played one of the worst periods I've ever seen. The only consolation I had was that Florida was playing almost as bad.

The game started in fine fashion, with Brouwer scoring a goal with his leg or maybe his ass (replays were inconclusive!) off a blast from Carlson, and the Caps took a 1-0 lead into the first intermission. But I've seen that song and dance before, and Washington has been dreadful in second periods. Thankfully, they finally decided to put for effort for the full sixty minutes. The Caps got two goals in each of the final two periods while Braden Holtby stopped all 27 Florida shots to seal the win. A lot of encouraging things happened -- Ovechkin finally scored an even strength goal, Holtby looked calm and confident in net and even scored a primary assist on Brouwer's power play goal with a beautiful up-ice pass, and the Fehr-Perreault-Ward line was creating chances all night and picked up two goals combined.

In the post-game interview Smokin' Al Koken asked Holtby if this game was a turning point. He said it only is if they can continue to play solid hockey. Truer words... I'm still not buying the 2012-13 incarnation of the Capitals as a playoff team. But for one night in February, it felt like the Caps and the Verizon Center of old.