In this series of Penguins-Capitals there can be fights that make Sidney Crosby and Alex Ovechkin similar in that they are tied to the hip joint. They can not escape from each other, on the ice or in the form of a conversation. Sid and Ovi joined the league together in 2005. They are very different players, and they had a very excellent career Hall of Fame, but in a sense they are inseparable.
Ovechkin has 1112 career points; Crosby has 1116 people.
As they arrived in the league, the Crosby Penguins accumulated 1,273 points in the regular season standings; In the capitals of Ovechkin accumulated 1253 people.
It is tempting to blame the failures in the postseason period of the Capitals on Ovechkin ("he's a loser!") And the temptation to completely release him. Both would be reductive and lazy. But there is a fundamental difference between Crosby and Ovechkin, and this manifested itself in the spring.
Crosby is a hockey sponge. He always watches the games. He remains after practice at all seasons to turn his weaknesses into strengths, even when no one has seen weaknesses. He loves playing as a kid loves his favorite toy. He takes it everywhere. It concerns all its parts. He can not imagine a day without him.
Ovechkin is not like that. It is quite competitive on the ice, but it may seem to him indifferent. He was never known as an excellent practitioner. He often appears on the Caps site, unaware of what happened in the league the day before.
Every time the penguins take ice, they know that their captain has done everything. Crosby is not just the most complete player of his generation; he is the most complete player he could be. Tim Duncan, his Brady. His attitude forms the whole of his franchise.
The penguins are falling in line for Crosby. Capitals must fall in line around Ovechkin. This does not keep Capital from winning the Cup, but this makes them difficult. In the playoffs, the difference between winning and losing is so thin. The whole series can end with a bounce rebound on two-on-one, which happened only because someone finished the check and the puck jumped in the right direction, and even the winning team does not know exactly why she won. But it certainly helps to understand that you have done everything you could have done before that moment.
When the team repeatedly loses in the postseason, we often say - or imply - that they are chokers: the pressure has reached them. Sometimes it's true, and the story of the postseason in Capitals is filled with so many collapses that it's easy to label their choker.
More often, however, there are other reasons for repeated failures after the season, in sports: injuries, luck, hot goalkeeper, repeatedly stumbling upon a super-team. And sometimes what seems suffocating is actually a team that is exposed. This, like everything that happened to Ovechkin and the capitals. The caps were very similar to their star: good enough to dominate the winter, but not full enough to win in the spring.
And that brings us to the Caps-Pens series this year. The capitals are in a rare position: they have experience in the postseason and an advantage on the ice, but they still lost. Perhaps this puts them in the right mental place to finally defeat the penguins. Perhaps these other factors - injuries, luck, hot goalkeeper - are finally on their side. Maybe Ovechkin has changed, slightly, or maybe it does not matter. Maybe the capital can do this year. A lot of strange things happened, especially in the playoffs of hockey. I'm sure Ovechkin's team is confident that they will win. But the Crosby team knows that this is possible.
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