Enjoying the Playoffs?

Well the dust has settled, the off season has begun for the Caps, and there are currently three teams left fighting for the cup.  Personally, I've found it hard to watch the rest of the playoffs because I hate everyone who is left.  I guess I'm rooting for the Kings if I had to pick someone.  I've been passing my time writing over at a new blog http://nats.dcsportsnexus.com/.  If you like the Nationals or just want to keep up with what I'm writing that's a place to check out.

We will try and have to Cup-finals posts here and once the off season truly gets underway we will start to cover any capitals related news.

Hope y'all are getting along in this post-captials world and as always, thanks for reading.

-Dru

Game 7 Failure Once Again.

I don't have a lot to say about tonight's game right now.  Can't say we didn't have our fair share of chances in it though.  In the days to come I'm sure we will be able to look back and reflect on the playoffs and the season.  We will be able to start looking ahead to next year.  Right now though, blah.

I present the evolution and of my playoff beard:

Nervous right before game 7 of the Boston Series.  That will be a night to remember: 

Optimistic before game 7 of the New York Series: 

After game 7 of the New York Series.  The end of the season:

Thanks for reading and check back in a few days of give me a follow on twitter (@dru90) to read our thoughts on the season. -Dru

Bring on the Rangers!

I have to admit, going into game 7 against the defending champs, at their arena, I didn't have a whole lot of faith that the Caps would pull it out. I've simply seen too many game 7s gone wrong in the past couple of years. The most I could hope for was that, for better or for worse, the game would be over by the end of the first period. That way, at least I would be spared a nail-biting heartbreaker and the cardiac arrest that comes with that.

Of course, the Caps being the Caps, the game naturally went into overtime. But then, Joel Ward managed to bury a rebound of a Mike Knuble shot to give the Caps the victory.

Game. Set. Match. The Caps had just won the closest series in NHL history and eliminated the defending Stanley Cup Champions. This Capitals team, under Dale Hunter, maintained enough discipline and composure to stick to their system and never panicked, even managing to kill off a penalty in the last 3 minutes of regulation. It wasn't easy, it was stressful as shit, but in the end, they made it.

We won game 7. In overtime. Against the defending champs. In Boston. That is not an insignificant thing. And as my thoughts turned to potential second-round matchups, I realized something: I'm beginning to believe in this team again.

Flyers? I'm not afraid of them. Ilya Bryzgalov is certainly no Tim Thomas, and given the injuries that have ravaged their D-corps, even that isn't as scary as usual. Sure, they have a lot of firepower up front, but if our guys managed to reduce Boston's top-6 to a non-factor for much of the series (with Carlson and Alzner breaking advanced stats in the process), there was no reason we couldn't do the same to Philly. Jersey? Please. Marty Brodeur is like a million years old, Ovechkin is better than Kovalchuk, and Volchenkov is one of their top D.

And New York, which is the matchup we ended up with. Regular season Eastern Conference champions. Of course, as Caps fans, we're well aware of what that counts for in the playoffs (jack shit). Lundqvist is probably the best goalie left in the East, but we've beaten him twice before, and the dropoff from him to Thomas isn't that huge. If we can beat one, we can beat the other. Girardi? Sure, he's a good defenseman, but he's no Zdeno Chara. And their forwards? Well, they've got depth, and Gaborik/Richards is a potent scoring threat. But our top-end talent can match them. I'm confident. After round 1, I don't think there's a single team left in the East we can't beat if, in the words of Johnny Boychuck (?), "we keep playing the same fuckin' way."

Puck drops for Round 2, Game 1 any time now. Bring it on.

Awards

Here is the compilation of the awards posts.  Thanks again for sticking with us all season!
  (If your only going to read one awards post, might we suggest Last Place?)

• Preview
• Opening Remarks 
• 3rd Place 
• Editor's Choice (Dru) 
• 2nd Place
• Editor's Choice (Murshawursha)
• 1st Place
• Fan-Favorite
• Most Improved
• Underperformer
• Last Place
• Closing Remarks

If you want to get in touch with the artist of the awards you can find him on Twitter @andromatta, or at the email address: matt.starsoneck@gmail.com.

Awards: Closing Remarks

So that puts the final wrap on a great season of CSN hockey coverage here at Action on the Ice.  When I started this a few months ago I had no intention of seeing it through to the end of the season.  I figured it would be a fun diversion and joke the occupy my time for awhile, but people actually showed up and read what I had to say.  I got my friend Nick to join the team and we decided to finish out the season.  Now that it's over I want to thank everybody who read anything here at Action on the Ice.  If you all weren't reading I would have stopped along time ago and what fun would that have been?  

Things are going to slow down here for the next couple months.  We might put up some posts about the playoffs as they are happening.  There will probably be some off season posts that go up at random times throughout the summer as well.  If you want to keep up with whenever the blog updates during that time period, the best way is probably to follow me on twitter: @Dru90 or to subscribe to the blog on an rss reader.

Finally, if you liked the artwork of the awards you can get in touch with the guy who did them on twitter: @andromatta or by email at matt.starsoneck@gmail.com.  Everybody should do that.

So I hope you enjoyed the awards, I hope you enjoyed the posts over the course of the season, and as always Lets Go Caps.

-Dru

Awards: Last Place

Finally, we have the Last place award.  This award goes to the member of the CSN crew who accumulated the lowest point total in the Action on the Ice standings.  The winner (or loser) of this award could be none other than Chuck “the Gormley” Gormley.  Chuck managed to rack up an impressively bad -11 point total on the season, despite only appearing in a few select home game broadcasts.  Chuck managed to do this be finishing in the last star spot every time he got the chance.  If Julie Donaldson gets credit for inspiring my blog’s title, than Gormley’s consistently bad performances get the credit for giving me the idea of critiquing the CSN broadcasters.  The reasons for Chuck’s poor performance have been discussed at length.  His lack of personality, his shallow and useless stories, his ridiculous claim of being a “capitals insider”, and the list could go on and on.  On this occasion I thought instead of ragging on Chuck yet again for his obvious flaws that I would do a little bit of “hard-core” investigative journalism to uncover why Chuck is the man we love-to-hate.  Or maybe that should be hate-to-hate.  So I present, The Chuck Gormley Story. (apologies in advance for any formatting errors with the pictures.  I am not a computer wizard.)

All of this is the conjecture of an overactive imagination and should not be taken as fact in any way shape, or form.  It is purely written for entertainment and is almost certainly 100% false.       

I began my investigation as any good investigator would, by googling Chuck’s name.  The results were...curious to say the least.

The first three results were all FLYERS related.  That is odd.  Now that I think about it I remember hearing that Chuck was a connected with the Flyers before he came over to Washington so maybe the search results aren’t that strange.  I decided to snoop onward and clicked on the first link, “Chuck’s Pucks”. 

WOW.  Alright so this is clearly something of a personal webpage.  It is also starting to look like Chuck wasn’t only working for the Flyers before he came to CSN, but that he was something of a superfan of the team.  Particularly interesting is the fact that he wrote a book, a book about Flyer’s Hockey.  The fact that he wrote a Flyer’s book confirms for me the idea that Gormley was a huge Flyer’s fan.  Suddenly, Twitter comments like these from Chuck during the last week of the NHL season come off a bit differently...

Chuck’s book sticks in my brain.  A person capable of writing an entire book must have some genuine skills as a reporter/writer.  Yet Chuck constantly seems to lack those skills with the Caps.  It doesn’t add up.  Is it possible that Chuck is just phoning it in with the Caps, that his heart really isn’t in it?  No, it can’t be the reason.  I proceed to scan his web page and then I find this.

What the hell!  The section labeled “Chuck’s Blog” is still being updated with recent Flyer’s news posts.  Chuck IS phoning it in with the Caps!

…

After a brief break period that I used to recover from my discovery I decided to click on on of Chuck’s blog stories.  Lets see what the Gormley is actually devoting his time too.

Hmmm that one doesn’t seem to be written by Chuck himself.  In fact, none of the links I clicked on seem to be directly written by Chuck.  They are all written by “Randy Miller”.  If these stories aren’t written by Gormley why is his webpage updating to post links to them underneath the heading “Chuck’s Blog” and who is this Randy Miller guy.

Okay so Randy is the Flyer’s writer for the Courier-Post.  His back story seems to check out and for the time being I am ruling out that “Randy” is an elaborate persona created by Chuck to allow him to cover the Flyers while working for CSNwashington.  Now that I knew who Randy was, I was still left with the question, why is Chuck updating his website with these stories.  Well, Randy’s bio said he started working for the Courier-Post in 2011.  Time for some time traveling...back to those heady days known as 2011

...

After going back through the archives of the Courier-Post it appears that Chuck Gormley was the Flyer’s reporter BEFORE Randy was given the job in 2011.  This discovery left me with a new question.  Why would Chuck, a die hard Flyer’s fan and a presumably somewhat successful author of a Flyer’s fan-book leave a job covering the team he loves to work for the Capitals in Washington?

I had to look no further than Chuck’s last post, August 17, 2011.

  

Reading through his final post there is no mention of his leaving for CSN washington.  What is even stranger is the fact that Chuck was announced as joining the CSN crew on August 1, 2011, meaning he knew he would be leaving...or did he?

In light of this information I was left with one conclusion...that Chuck intended to keep working for both the Flyers and the Caps and wanted to keep this information a secret from his Flyer’s readers/employers.  The rest of the story seems pretty simple to piece together.  People found out that Chuck was two-timing the Flyers.  He was let go at his post at the Courier-Post and replaced by Randy Miller.  The aftermath of these events left a depressed and souless Chuck who had lost his dream job.  Sure, he still had his CSN job, but his heart wasn’t in it.  Now Chuck drifts along collecting paychecks from CSNwashington while wishing he could return to his true love, the Flyer’s.  My final piece of evidence to tie everything together is a few of the comments that appeared on Chuck’s final Courier-Post blog article.

Strange comments.  Three repeats heaping generic praise and promises to return to the site whenever Chuck posts again.  One claiming that they are a first time viewer and pointing out that everyone seems to love Chuck.  All of them posted in December, several months after Chuck had left and Randy had taken over.  How did these four people find their way to Chuck’s last article and why did they say the things they did.  I couldn't find any comments of these sort on an of Randy's articles.  This seems like an impossible question to answer.  However, maybe the person we should be asking is Chuck Gormley himself...

So there you have it.  The Chuck Gormley Story.  All of this is conjecture of an overactive imagination and should not be taken as fact in any way shape or form.  Congrats on your last place finish Chuck and thanks for giving us stuff to write about here at Action on the Ice!              

Awards: Underperformer

The Underperformer award is given out to the member of the CSN crew who failed to live up to expectations.  This person isn't the worst member of the crew.  They don't lack skills and talents to make them a successful broadcaster.  On the contrary they possess both of those things, but for some reason was unable to use them to score points this season.  This years underperformer award goes to Chick Hernandez.

Chick isn't a bad broadcaster.  He is pretty personable, seems to try to do his job well, and can sound down right distinguished at times during his highlight recaps.  He also gets plenty of air time, normally at least one game a week he finds himself handling intermissions.  So why did he only manage to score 1 point this season?  It is actually quite hard to put a finger on.  He doesn't normally make huge mistakes and I rarely come away from his broadcasts with anything other than a smile.  It just felt like he lacked a little bit of fight this season.  He didn't seem to WANT to win.  That is until he found out he was in danger of finishing the season without any points.  He showed up during the last game of the season and made sure he finished in the top 3.  It is that kind of attitude that he needs to carry into next season to make the most out of his opportunities.