Caps have no chance.
I know you are being facetious and superstitious here, but I just heard a blog from Alan May commenting on the key things the Caps need to do in the upcoming series. I think he might have made a slip-up at the end of his commentary that indicates his true assessment of the Caps/Vegas series. After discussing the keys to victory (defensive coverage/PK/PP) he concluded by making a comment very much like this: "If the Caps can accomplish these key things, they may have a chance to beat the Golden Knights."
Note he didn't say that if the Caps do these things they will be "tough to beat," "in good shape," or any reasonably positive assessment. He sees them, if they do what he says, "having a chance." He sounded as if Vegas is what I have said to others that they are: Not a Cinderella by any means, but simply as good as any team in the NHL this year, and a solid to prohibitive favorite to take the Stanley Cup.
Beyond the Caps/McPhee connection, I think this series is fascinating for another reason. The Caps aren't just representing themselves in this series, they are representing the entire other-30-team NHL establishment against the most Johnny-come-lately upstart possible. I am wondering if the NHL isn't secretly hoping that the Caps win this series to avoid the embarrassment of a first-team franchise winning the Stanley Cup.
Why do I term it an embarrassment? Not because of the oft-discussed argument that the expansion draft rules were too favorable to Vegas and they got too good a set of players; but rather, because this set of players, however good they are as a group, jelled into a powerhouse INSTANTLY. This team wasn't just an unimaginably good first-year team; they were unimaginably good from the first WEEK of the season. They came out of the gate like a house afire and never looked back. In NHL thinking, this simply shouldn't happen, because the NHL is a team game where chemistry and team development matters, and any franchise needs to go through tough times to learn how to succeed. A franchise needs to build chemistry and the know-how to do both the obvious and the subtle things to survive both an interminable regular season and the rigors of the Stanley Cup playoffs, which the NHL likes to market as the toughest championship to win in all of sports.
Caps fans have bought into this; fans are talking about "it's our time," as though it's taken the franchise all this time without a championship to finally "get it right". But heck, Vegas pulled players literally from all over the continent, and in the space of a training camp had all the chemistry and know-how they needed to take this league by storm. Their success blows the whole "This league is tough to succeed in and you need to develop the capability to win over time" paradigm out of the water. Their success suggests that gradual growth and development of a franchise ISN'T necessarily the model; get some kind of formula right and you can literally run roughshod over the league starting next week.
The Caps not only represent themselves in this series; they represent the traditional NHL marketing storyline that success isn't easy, that you need to work hard and figure out how to win over time, and eventually your time may come. DC's been talking about this recently, rationalizing the Caps' playoff success this year after he had badmouthed the organization and its players for years. He's been saying that it has happened because the players changed, and finally bought into the argument that you need to knuckle down and find an extra playoff gear if you are going to succeed in the playoffs, a lesson, according to him, that had never sunk in before. The NHL would love him for evangelizing their party line. And maybe the NHL is hoping for a Caps victory to legitimize that party line as well. Because if Vegas wins, that entire marketing story line, the basis of the sport's argument for the greatness of its competition, goes down the tubes. What would they use as a replacement? That the league is easy enough that a new team can be pulled out of thin air and could blast the entire league out of the water?
It seems to me that this is a watershed moment for the NHL. If Vegas wins, they can market it as the greatest out-of-the-blue accomplishment in the history of professional sports, which I think is demonstrably true. But it bursts the balloon on the decades-old glamorization of their sport.
