from Dan Steinberg of D.C. Sports Bog at The Washington Post,

Had I been running the Capitals late Wednesday night, I would have fired every staffer from the head coach to the head cook, told half the players they’d be traded, and informed the other half that winning another Presidents Trophy would be a fireable offense.

You would have done the same thing. You might even have fired the assistant cook. There was anger everywhere, enough that my single page of random snippets overheard on the Verizon Center concourse included five profanities in eight lines. One of the lines consisted of just four letters. All caps.

So I did the rational thing, and I waited 24 hours, and then things started coming into focus. The Capitals were the NHL’s best regular-season team two years in a row. Both times, thanks to an obscene NHL playoff format, they wound up playing the East’s second-best team in the second round. Both series were tight; over 13 games, the Penguins outscored Washington by three goals, 36-33. Over the last two playoff seasons, Washington has, by a massive margin, the NHL’s biggest advantage in 5-on-5 shot attempts. (The Caps are plus-202, more than twice as much as anyone else.) Making a panicked overhaul might satisfy disgruntled fans out for scalps. But turning the league’s best team into a less-good team is like trading a free spin of a dollar slot machine for a free spin of a penny slot machine, just because your last four spins on the dollar machine were all losers. Superstitions are fun, but they aren’t a strategy.

Then I attended Friday’s breakdown interviews, an annual Washington ritual of regret. There was very little talk of we’ll-get-em-next-year. There was very little talk of trusting the process. It sounded like the players would consider firing themselves.

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