Capital Crimes

Today the LOSE presents the first of what I hope to become a regular series of guest posts from fellow long-suffering fans either intrigued or morbidly curious about the act of losing, or maybe just in need of an act of literary exorcism so as to purge some frustration. Tonight’s post comes from world-class scrabbler, perennial Austin Adult Spelling Bee winner, multi-instrumentalist, and long-suffering Washington Capitals fan Geoff Thevenot, author of the outstanding Scrambled and Unscrambled blog, which you should all read when you’re not reading IN PLAY LOSE. Take it away Geoff …

Hi, I'm Geoff. I grew up near Washington, D.C., and I have been a Washington Capitals fan since January 26, 1977, when my father took me, age 6, and my little brother Brian, age 4, to a Capitals game against the Detroit Red Wings at the old Capital Centre down the road. The Capitals won the game, 4-1; the goal sirens and loud cheering enthralled me, as did the entire contents of the game program and the next day's standings and boxscore because I was that kind of kid, and I was hooked for life. The starting goalies in the game were Roger Crozier for the Caps and Ed Giacomin for the Red Wings - my dad taught me how to pronounce Giacomin's surname, which I thought was really cool. No, I'm not old.

What I could not have known at the time was how rare an event I had witnessed. The Caps were a third-year expansion team at the time and would finish with just 24 wins in 80 games. My father had the good sense to take us to a game the Caps might win, against a strip-mined Red Wings team that hadn't done anything right since Gordie Howe left a few years before.

And what I *really* couldn't have known was the legacy I was heir to. The underpowered 24-42-14 team we watched that night, believe it or not, had made a quantum leap forward from where they were two years before. Coaches have won Jack Adams Trophies for less.

***

The Capitals began play in the fall of 1974, handicapped in a multiplicity of ways. The NHL contained just the Original Six teams of ancient legend as late as 1967, owing to the extraordinary stubbornness of its owners, but finally realized the opportunity before them and expanded to 12 teams in one go, and further to 16 by 1972. This thinned out the talent, but there was enough to go around - too few teams before meant that lots of deserving players weren't getting the chance to prove themselves, and the initial rounds of expansion helped fix that. But then a rival league, the WHA, started playing in the fall of 1972, and while not as powerful as the NHL, they had some money to throw around. They notably signed Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull, but they also competed for lesser talents - a second- or third-line player in the NHL might well be a star in the early WHA, and lots of less famous players made the leap as well...also, the talent pool itself was much thinner in the early 70s than it would be later, because the Europeans had yet to arrive. Into the late 70s, over 90 percent of NHL players were Canadian-born; by the mid-90s, only about 60 percent of them were.

But the NHL was still committed to expand once more, and so the Capitals and Kansas City Scouts would start playing in the 1974-75 season. (And they had reason to, if for nothing other than outracing the WHA to those cities.) There was an expansion draft, but it was most uncharitable: each existing NHL team got to protect 16 skaters and two goalies, so the best the Caps and Scouts could do was pick players that the existing teams viewed as no better than their 17th best skater or third-string goalie. And many of the class of players somewhat better than that, guys who could have helped here, were under contract to one of the 14 teams in the WHA. After the season, many observers thought that the 1974 NHL expansions had been a mistake. Can't blame them, though both teams do still exist - the Scouts moved to Colorado in 1976 and then New Jersey in 1981, becoming the New Jersey Devils we know today.

The Capitals, endowed with that foundation of sinking sand, proceeded to weaken themselves even further at the 1974 amateur draft. Look at it and you will cry. The three-year-old New York Islanders, picking fourth in each round but having the key advantage of knowing what the hell they were doing, came away with Clark Gillies and Bryan Trottier. The Capitals, picking first in each round, came away with Greg Joly and Mike Marson. (Their 1975 draft was even worse.)

And then there's this. Yes, that's right, white pants. That happened. Not for nothing are "diapers" and "despair" anagrams of each other.

As bad as you would expect a team forged in all these fires at once to be, the expansion Caps were even more fecal than that. The first thing you notice is the record. They won 8 games and tied 5 on the year, which means they lost the other 67. And away from home, they were far worse: they lost their first 37 road games outright before eking out a 3-2 win against the horrible-but-not-quite-as-horrible California Golden Seals (doesn't that name just tell you they're bad? Good sports teams don't have names like that). But the win-loss record is just the beginning.

Here is one of the coolest bits of symmetry in the sports record book. The record for goals scored by a team in one season is 446, by the 1983-84 Edmonton Oilers. Did you see this team? You wouldn't believe it. The Wayne Gretzky Oilers, at their peak. They lit people up every damn night. Too many weapons, including the ultimate one, Wayne himself. This was before the invention of the devilish (sorry) neutral-zone trap and other defensive strategies; this is what happens when one team has vastly superior talent and game planning at the exact moment in history when no one else has an answer for it, as happened with the 16-0 New England Patriots up until the Super Bowl that year. Video game numbers. Wayne Gretzky put up 205 points (87 goals, 118 assists) - the next best non-Oiler total was 121. They damn near broke hockey. Their like will never be seen again.

The record for goals allowed is exactly the same - 446. That's our expansion Capitals. Yes, you heard that right: when facing those Caps, a league-average NHL offensive team turned into the Wayne Gretzky Oilers at their peak. So what happened when a really good team faced them? We have your evidence: the first-year Capitals were placed, cruelly, in a division with the Montreal Canadiens, the powerhouse of the mid-to-late 70s. In their six matches, the Canadiens outscored the Capitals 49-9. (The Caps couldn't score either - they netted a sad 181 goals on the year, far below the league average of 273.)

There are just so many beautiful indices of the first-year Caps' ineptitude, I can hardly decide what to present first. The expansion Capitals are to hockey what Pedro Carolino's "English As She Is Spoke" was to English pedagogy:

- Since the '67-68 expansion that marks the modern era of NHL hockey, by my count, 16 players have achieved a plus-minus rating of negative 50 or worse; a plus-minus that wretched is a singular achievement. The expansion Capitals had EIGHT such players on the roster, including one (Jack Lynch) who managed to rack up a -54 in just 20 games; Bill Mikkelson, who played 54 games for the team that year, set the all-time record for worst plus-minus at -82.

- The Capitals had a 17-game losing streak, a 10-game losing streak, a 9-game losing streak and two 7-game losing streaks. All in the same season.

- There is a formula, commonly referred to as the Pythagorean formula, that predicts wins and losses from runs/goals/points scored and allowed in various sports, and it's usually pretty close to its target. When it's not, we can surmise that a team may have been unusually good or bad in clutch situations, or unusually lucky or unlucky. Almost every historically awful team also shows up as unlucky by this analysis, which makes intuitive sense - the worst teams ever should be those that were both bad *and* unlucky, right? Not these Caps, though: this formula suggests they should have ended up with something like 11 standings points, even less than the record-low 21 they actually had. There's a good reason they exceeded expectations: they got to play their expansion brethren, the Kansas City Scouts, who would have been the league's worst in almost any other year, and a few other troubled franchises. The league was unusually stratified at the time. In an NHL with a more normal competitive ecology, these Caps might have struggled to win even five games. Their record overrates them. (The 92-93 Ottawa Senators and San Jose Sharks, with win-loss records nearly as bad, would have blown the 74-75 Caps off the ice, no doubt in my mind. It was a different league by then.)

- To illustrate this further, there is a stat on hockey-reference.com called Point Shares, which attempts to mine the data and figure out how much each player contributed to his team's standings points for the year. In most cases, the point shares for all the individual players on a team add up roughly to the team's point total: for example, the 2009-10 Penguins add up to 100.15, and the team actually had 101 standings points. For normal teams, the average difference is about 4-5 points. The first-year Caps break this model: they had 21 standings points, but the sum total of their players' contributions is estimated to be...2.7. Yes, two point seven. As a team. In 1988-89, Mario Lemieux had 19.56 point shares by himself.

- Who was the 74-75 Caps' best player? Tommy Williams was a 34-year-old right winger who had spent the previous two seasons as a mid-line player for the New England Whalers of the WHA, after a largely undistinguished run of seasons in the NHL in the sixties. Williams would have had to hustle to make the third line on most NHL teams, but on these Caps, he was the man. He led the team with 58 points, tying him for 70th place in the NHL; Denis Dupere was a distant second on the team with 35.

- The first-year Capitals had three coaches. Teams with three coaches in a single season tend not to have the good records, as a rule. Jimmy Anderson was let go after his 4-45-5 start, but apparently he was not the problem, as Red Sullivan (these names sound like they're from the 1940s; surely fedoras and whiskey are involved in here somewhere) guided the hometown heroes to a 2-16-0 mark. Milt Schmidt, who I think was also the GM but am too lazy to check at the moment, finished out the year behind the bench with a rousing 2-6-0 record.

- A week in the life: During the week of February 18-25, 1975, when I was busy attending pre-K, the Capitals lost consecutive games 6-1, 9-4, 10-3, 7-2 and 6-2. You'd think they'd have gotten tired of that, but no, they went on to lose twelve more games in a row, including losses of 8-0, 12-1, 7-2 and 8-2. Ten of these seventeen games were at home.

- My father attended a second-year Caps versus Canadiens game. He has reported since that the entire game was played at one end of the ice, and that the Capitals appeared to be in slow motion like on the TV. The game ended 11-0 or something.

- The Caps surrendered eight or more goals 16 times. Yes, one fifth of the time.

- The Caps were shut out in 12 games and scored just one goal in 17 others.

- The Caps scored about 13% of the time on the power play, while giving up power play goals 29% of the time. And those don't even count toward plus-minus ratings.

- The Caps gave up 255 goals - on the road. Their *average* road game in 1974-75 was a 7-2 loss.

- Starting goalie Ron Low played 48 games and racked up a GAA of 5.45, and he was clearly the best goalie on the roster. The backup goalie, Michel Belhumeur (great name), was in net for 27 decisions and did not win any of them.

- As you'd expect, almost no one on the roster lasted more than a couple of years longer in the league after the year ended. Defenseman Yvon Labre (whose #7 was eventually retired by the Capitals, the equivalent of a Purple Heart), a castoff from the Penguins, lasted the longest.

- Their final game was an 8-4 win over those Penguins, who had already made the playoffs and thus started their drinking at 11 am instead of 11 pm. In music, this is called a Picardy third - a hopeful major triad at the end of a mournful minor-key piece.