WASHINGTON — The Redskins made a rare investment in their defensive line in 2016 and 2017 and the results have quickly showed.

Daron Payne and Jonathan Allen, the two most recent first-round picks and the first defensive linemen the organization has selected in that round since Kenard Lang in 1997, were on the field early and often in Sunday’s 31-17 win against the Green Bay Packers.

That’s an understatement — they never really left. Allen played 65 of 69 defensive snaps and Payne 64 against the Packers. That’s 94 percent for Allen and 93 percent for Payne. On a rainy day at FedEx Field, with Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers hobbled by a knee injury, the Redskins held the Packers to 100 rushing yards on 17 carries. They controlled the game up front, something Washington hasn’t done often in recent years.

“The first couple games we had a rotation going and trying to get their feet wet together, especially Daron, but I think he showed that he can handle the reps and we want to get him out there,” Redskins coach Jay Gruden said. “We didn’t draft him in the first round to sit by me. We wanted him to play as much as possible and I was impressed with the way that he and Jonathan played, not only at the start of the game, but at the end of the game.”

This is rare. Very rare. It’s unclear the last time two defensive linemen played more than 90 percent of the snaps in one game for Washington. The NFL doesn’t track that stat past 2012. A single Washington offensive lineman has only done so once since 2012 when Stephen Bowen played 62 of 68 snaps (92 percent) against the Rams in Week 2 that season.

Since then, the Redskins have gone with a rotation heavy philosophy in large part because they didn’t have the talent up front to stick with specific players. That has spanned three different defensive coordinators (Jim Haslett, Joe Barry, Greg Manusky). And the idea of two players hitting that 90 percent mark? It hasn’t happened. You’d likely have to go back to the days of Dexter Manley and Charles Mann in the late 1980s.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY |

The only times two defensive linemen together played 80 percent of snaps in a game was twice in the 2013 season when Bowen and nose tackle Barry Cofield did it against the Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys, and in 2015 also against the Lions when Ziggy Hood and Chris Baker did it. Haslett gave those players heavy workloads early that season before Bowen got hurt.

Allen — who missed the final 11 games of his rookie year with a Lisfranc sprain sustained in a Week 6 game against the San Francisco 49ers — had two sacks for the first time in his career and five tackles, three solo. Payne recorded his first career sack and also had five tackles, four solo.

“You’ve got to go out there and play with heart, effort and intensity,” Allen said. “The rest will take care of itself…I have to give a lot of credit to [outside linebacker] Preston [Smith] and the defensive backs. They forced [quarterback Aaron Rodgers] up in the pocket and I got him.”

That was a change from the first two weeks when Payne played 30 (57 percent) and 39 snaps (64 percent) and Allen had 28 (53 percent) and 43 (70 percent). But they showed they could handle the increased work so Manusky pushed them even further against Green Bay. Not bad for players who are 23 (Allen) and 21 (Payne).

“They were flying to the football,” Gruden said. “They were making plays downfield, in the pocket, in the running game. Those two guys together, the vision that we had when we drafted them getting Jonathan and Daron together came to fruition yesterday.”

Washington also received production from Matt Ioannidis, 24, another young defensive lineman. The Temple product was chosen in the fifth round of the 2016 draft and had a breakthrough season in 2017 with 4.5 sacks. He already has three in three games this season and has a forced fumble and fumble recovery. Even though he only played 18 snaps (26 percent), Ioannidis contributed. Funny what happens when a team injects youth into the lineup.

The Redskins drafted 181 players between 1992 and when they took Ioannidis in 2016. Only 15 of those players (8 percent) in that 24-year period were defensive linemen. Only Lang was a first-round pick, chosen No. 17 overall in 1997 like Allen, and only Shane Collins (1992) and Jarvis Jenkins (2011) were second rounders. The other 12 players were drafted in the fourth round or later or in the NFL’s supplemental draft.

Washington drafted another defensive lineman in the fifth round this season when it took Virginia Tech’s Tim Settle. He didn’t play a defensive snap against the Packers. Then again, neither did Hood, the lone veteran on the NFL’s youngest defensive line. That might not change much for a while.

“I hope so and we’re not down on anybody else,” Gruden said. “But I think those two guys are special guys and they need to be on the field. We have some other guys that can play without a doubt, but those two guys are first rounders and very talented, so the more they play the better they get.”

Ěýis a senior staff writer and co-founder of The Sports Capitol. He is also an award-winning multimedia journalist, who has covered the Redskins, Capitals and Nationals for the Washington Examiner, Washington Times and 106.7 The Fan and major events like the Super Bowl, NCAA basketball tournament, Stanley Cup playoffs, NBA playoffs, NFL Combine and NFL Draft.

Source

ARLINGTON, Va. —ĚýThe grieving process lasted the entire summer of 2017 and continued well into the season.

The Capitals, who had the NHL’s best record two years running and nothing to show for it except heartache and a depleted roster, spent last year’s training camp coming to terms with consecutive second-round Stanley Cup playoff exits to the Pittsburgh Penguins that left them devastated.

The entire organization had to accept that loss, mourn it and, at some point, move on. It took months. Eventually, after fits and starts, they managed it. They won another Metropolitan Division title and finally, memorably, the Stanley Cup. This September features a much different problem for Washington. How do you let go of a championship?

“I was thinking to myself a couple weeks ago that we’ve got to realize that everything is going to be tougher to start and all the games are going to be tougher against us,” center Nicklas Backstrom said. “We better play our best hockey to start. That’s reality.”

The summer was a time for celebration. The Capitals won the Cup on June 7 in Las Vegas. They returned to Washington for one of the all-time great parties, almost a full week bender that ended with a parade down Constitution Avenue. They all left town eventually, but the Cup visited them in their hometowns or another place of their choosing.

It was only after their day with the Cup that most players could detach themselves and start planning and training for the upcoming season, which begins Oct. 3. That’s when they get the chance to defend their title.

“It’s extremely hard to do,” forward Tom Wilson said. “You get respect and — I don’t know why I’m saying this — but you respect a team like Pittsburgh. When you see a team repeat like that, you know, it’s so hard to win let alone to do it twice. It’s a huge achievement. That’s one that we’re ready for.”

The Penguins went on to win the Cup in 2016 and 2017 after eliminating the Capitals, who finally returned the favor with a six-game series victory in the second round in May en route to their own championship.

Players insisted their celebrations weren’t quite as long as they seemed on social media. T.J. Oshie joked that fans came up to him all summer and asked him to pull his shirt over his head and crush a beer as he did multiple times in the hours and days after the Cup win. He quickly began declining those requests with a simple “No, I’m good.”

SUBSCRIBE TODAY |

Oshie, while acknowledging how hard that is, insists Washington can repeat. But he thinks back often to the playoff series where the Capitals imposed their will on the teams they played. He thinks of Game 4 in the first-round series against Columbus and Game 2 against the Penguins, both 4-1 wins, and the combined 7-0 drubbing they put on Tampa Bay in Games 6 and 7 of the Eastern Conference final despite being down 3-2 in the series and facing elimination. At the victory parade, Oshie started a “back-to-back” chant that had the huge crowd roaring.

“The reason I said back-to-back is because we brought ourselves to a level of playing where the other teams just didn’t play their game anymore,” Oshie said. “We brought people out of their comfort zone and we just stuck to what we had. That reassurance of winning the Stanley Cup with the guys we have is I think something that, it just sticks with you that you can do it, that you’re able to do it. Whereas before I feel like there were some doubts.”

Last September, management still believed it had a quality team, but there was a palpable fragility to it. There were too many untested rookies moving into the lineup, too much uncertainty about how the veterans would react as they got set to push the rock back up the hill after the Penguin losses and the departure of players like Nate Schmidt and Karl Alzner and Kevin Shattenkirk and Marcus Johansson.

General manager Brian MacLellan and defenseman Brooks Orpik, among many others, later expressed bewilderment that anyone expected the Capitals to just fade away. Owner Ted Leonsis said on the ice at T-Mobile Arena, as the Stanley Cup celebration whirled around him, that he never had any doubts.

But while all three men genuinely believed they still had a good team, that the window to win hadn’t closed on them completely, they’re only human. Washington had competitive teams almost every year since 2007-08. It never won. So while the doubts of outsiders fueled them, uncertainty still lingered no matter what they said months later.

“A year ago was tough,” goalie Braden Holtby said. “It was a situation where you lose a lot of guys from a very good team before and you go through a transition period. Every year is different that way. We learned a lot about ourselves last year how we can push through.”

Last year, head coach Barry Trotz was the one who had to guide them through that period. He’s gone now after rejecting a contract offer that would have kept him with Washington and instead took the same job with the New York Islanders.

Todd Reirden, his top assistant who enters his fifth year with the organization, is the new coach. He’s been here before. His first year as an assistant coach with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2010 came after they won the Stanley Cup. Reirden saw firsthand how that team, which included Orpik, handled the nightly challenge of playing with a target on its back. It was difficult. So he was blunt about his expectations with his players. Each one got a call before their day with the Cup.

“I was really clear with them,” Reirden said. “I sent them all an e-mail about what was to be expected of them to start camp. They knew that [the first day of camp] was going to be a difficult day, we were going to have a skate test, we were going to have a hard practice. They know that they were to come back here ready to work.”

Now they are back and ready to go. Washington has its first preseason home game Tuesday after losing in a shootout to the Boston Bruins on Sunday. There is little competition for roster spots in camp other than one or two forward spots on the fourth line, possibly a third-pair defenseman and backup goalie. Other than forward Jay Beagle and goalie Philipp Grubauer, it is very much the same group that won a championship together. To win another, they have to let that go.

“When you taste it, you want it more and more,” captain Alex Ovechkin said. “I think you can see lots of guys still have memories of what they did with the Cup and how awesome it was when the whole town was just going nuts. It’s something special, you know. You just don’t want to stop it. You just want to continue to do it.”

Ěýis a senior staff writer and co-founder of The Sports Capitol. He is also an award-winning multimedia journalist, who has covered the Redskins, Capitals and Nationals for the Washington Examiner, Washington Times and 106.7 The Fan and major events like the Super Bowl, NCAA basketball tournament, Stanley Cup playoffs, NBA playoffs, NFL Combine and NFL Draft.

Source

AT TSC HEADQUARTERS —ĚýThe business never stops.

Less than two weeks ago, the Capitals began a Stanley Cup celebration that lasted five days, a generation’s worth of emotion pouring out in one of the great parties this city has ever seen. But while the players drank and sang and paraded through the District, the machine continued to grind.

Now the Stanley Cup champions need a new head coach. Barry Trotz is gone, a victim of his own success, but also a business decision by a franchise not known for paying high prices for the position.

The seeds of Trotz’s departure were planted last summer. He had led a talented roster to back-to-back Presidents’ Trophies and three times to the second round of the playoffs. He validated his 15 seasons in Nashville, where the Predators also never made it past the second round, but were usually competitive with far less talent and resources available than in Washington.

The Capitals were excellent. It didn’t work out for them in the postseason. Trotz bore the brunt of those slings and arrows and it hurt. It hurt like hell. Listen to how he answered awkward questions about his status throughout the spring during Washington’s memorable playoff run and it’s there: All the anguish and frustration that his team had to work through last fall after falling short, Trotz himself endured last summer. He lost a close friend. He reevaluated how he viewed himself in light of those devastating playoff failures in 2016 and 2017. But perspective didn’t mean total absence of pain, either. In that respect, Trotz could identify with Alex Ovechkin, his captain, who has faced similar barbs throughout his 13-year career.

“Yes, absolutely, because I’ve been at this for a while and it’s so hard to move forward sometimes,” Trotz said May 7 after his team eliminated the Pittsburgh Penguins in the second round. “It’s always thrown in your face everywhere your turn.”

There was no contract extension coming. The playoffs were all that mattered. He would have to coach as a lame duck in the final year of his deal. He would have to earn another one with a lesser roster, shredded by free agency and the salary cap, and that seemed an unfair ask for anyone. Yes, the Capitals believed they still had a good team. No, even in their wildest dreams they didn’t think it was a Stanley Cup season. After all those talented groups fell short? Are you kidding?

Trotz had done good work and deserved to finish the thing out. But the guillotine always hung above his head ready to drop. Todd Reirden, his top assistant, had been promoted, kept at times from interviewing for other head coaching jobs and was under contract for 2018-19.

Reirden came from Pittsburgh, where he joined the organization in 2008 and was an assistant coach for the Penguins from 2010 to 2014. He played college hockey at Bowling Green – as did Capitals general manager Brian MacLellan. He had no previous professional ties to Trotz the way Washington assistant coach Lane Lambert did in Nashville. The writing was on the wall for Trotz.

“Our situation, we were struggling at the time to get over the hump,” MacLellan said Monday. “We couldn’t get out of the second round and Barry hadn’t been able to coach out of the second round yet, either. I think from the organization’s perspective, some changes would’ve had to be made if we lost in the second round again.”

SUBSCRIBE TODAY |

That’s an awkward situation to put your coaching staff in. And there were times this season when it appeared Trotz could be fired at any moment. The Capitals were 10-9-1 after an ugly November road trip to Nashville and Colorado. The vibes around the team were ominous. A bad homestand just before Thanksgiving could have ended it. Instead, after getting lambasted by Trotz, who told them to stop feeling sorry for themselves, the players responded. They found the peace and clarity he’d searched for so hard months earlier and finally found.

There was another rough patch in February and early March and if that had continued maybe Trotz was in trouble again. But the Capitals responded even after they briefly fell out of first place in the Metropolitan Division and in retrospect their 12-3 finish to the regular season was a precursor to their Cup run. The postseason didn’t start that way, though.

What looked like an easy, obvious coaching change with Washington down 0-2 in the first round to the Columbus Blue Jackets and fans and media ready to call it a season didn’t look that way a few weeks later. The Capitals rallied to win four in a row in part because the players never panicked. They believed they could come back.

Related Gallery

PHOTOS: Caps fans celebrate in epic fashion

Fans went wild as the Washington Capitals made history and captured the Stanley Cup for the first time ever. See photos and hear how they reacted to the win.

Trotz’s representatives made clear to the Capitals that he expected to be compensated like one of the best coaches in the NHL. That meant a salary north of $4 million and five years. But the business side of pro sports doesn’t care much for how good a person is or what he’s earned.

The Capitals have always valued coaches a certain way under owner Ted Leonsis. It’s why former general manager George McPhee was constantly hiring untested coaches (Bruce Cassidy, Glen Hanlon, Bruce Boudreau, Dale Hunter, Adam Oates). Not a single one of those men had coached an NHL team before McPhee hired him – though obviously Oates and Hunter had long, distinguished playing careers.

Trotz was the outlier. Trotz was the one coach long on experience, if short on playoff results. He started his NHL career as a scout in Washington and he returned to change the culture of an organization that had never once broken through.

MacLellan saw that in him when he hired Trotz shortly after taking over for McPhee, his longtime friend and boss, in 2014. It worked, they won a title together and that still wasn’t enough. Trotz earned a raise and some security and he will get it at some point even if he has to take a year off. The Capitals long ago decided that wasn’t something they give to any coach – even one who led them to that elusive Stanley Cup.

They will raise a banner and host another celebration in the fall. Trotz will always be a part of that legacy. In a way, it’s a minor miracle he kept his team together in the face of all that lingering heartache and his own uncertain fate. If this was a fairy tale, both sides figure it out and come back to defend a championship together. Even after the party we’ve seen in this city the past two weeks, we should have known: They don’t take the title or the memories away. Those are yours to keep. But the relentless machine goes about its work well before the revelry fades.

“In the end, I think sports is a business,” MacLellan said. “You want it to work out. You want it to be a game. You want it to be all fun. But 10 days after you win a Cup, we have to come here and do this. It’s not fun.”

Ěýis a senior staff writer and co-founder of The Sports Capitol. He is also an award-winning multimedia journalist, who has covered the Redskins, Capitals and Nationals for the Washington Examiner, Washington Times and 106.7 The Fan and major events like the Super Bowl, NCAA basketball tournament, Stanley Cup playoffs, NBA playoffs, NFL Combine and NFL Draft.

Source

LAS VEGAS — There were so many nights this moment seemed out of reach, so many times they sat at their lockers staring into the offseason void after another devastating loss.

Related Gallery

PHOTOS: Caps fans celebrate in epic fashion

Fans went wild as the Washington Capitals made history and captured the Stanley Cup for the first time ever. See photos and hear how they reacted to the win.

Ovechkin kissed the Cup, took the trophy for a brief twirl down the ice at T-Mobile Arena and skated back toward Nicklas Backstrom, his teammate for 11 years, and handed it over.

“F—ing right!” Backstrom yelled.

The raw emotion was overwhelming. Eleven years of heartache for them, 43 seasons for the Capitals, erased in an instant of pure joy that later left players helpless to describe it.

The franchise that once carried a garbage can around the ice to celebrate the end of a 37-game road losing streak, the franchise that perfected the blown 3-1 lead, that has lost quadruple overtime playoff games two different times and won three Presidents’ Trophies in the past nine seasons with nothing to show for them, is finally a champion.

Devante Smith-Pelly scored the game-tying goal at 9:52 of the third period and Lars Eller followed 2:31 later with the go-ahead goal that held up as a winner. They, too, are champions after a 4-3 victory over the Vegas Golden Knights in Game 5 of the Stanley Cup Final.

Those are the particulars, the details of how the game itself was won. But it was the culmination of those 43 seasons, all the near-misses and the should-have-beens kicked to the curb at long last. There will be a parade and rings and their names will be on the Cup, which will visit them all at a place of their choosing this summer.

“I think this moment, we waiting a long, long time,” Ovechkin said. “Since day one, [owner] Ted [Leonsis], I was at that house. We just kind of met the family. We were swimming in the pool. He told me, like, one day we’re going to win it. It was the first year [2005]. I don’t even know what the team is.”

Washington had one really good team after another fall short from the early 1980s through the Ovechkin era. The great tragedy about the Capitals wasn’t that they always lost. It was that they almost won. They were Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill knowing at some point it was coming back down on them and they’d have to start again.

SUBSCRIBE TODAY |

Five times they have blown 3-1 series leads. That’s only happened 28 times in NHL history. They own 18 percent of those collapses. Five times they have been eliminated in a Game 7 on home ice during Ovechkin’s 13-year career alone. No wonder he screamed so loud and long.

He’d earned it, paid for it with a decade of frustration, left a piece of himself behind in locker rooms in Pittsburgh and New York and Tampa Bay and, yes, Washington, where he could barely peel off his uniform sometimes after playoff failures that all blended together.

“To me, they changed all the narratives. They checked off every box,” Capitals coach Barry Trotz said. “Look at every series. We were down in every series, come back in every one. It was probably fitting we were down in this game and had to come back and win.”

Since 1980 only three NHL teams have more wins than Washington (1,464) — the Boston Bruins, Detroit Red Wings and Philadelphia Flyers. The Capitals have made the Stanley Cup playoffs 28 times in 35 years. They have more wins than any team in the NHL since 2007-08 (507) — except for the Pittsburgh Penguins (514). Of course. Their history is littered with spectacular flameouts, three generations’ worth. But those failures define the franchise no more.

“It doesn’t come easy. It took years,” goalie Braden Holtby said. “Years of heartbreak. Years of breaking things down and trying again, breaking things down and trying again, and this group never gave up and we finally did it.”

The spoilers’ names resound through history: Pat LaFontaine and the Easter Epic; Jaroslav Halak and Petr Nedved; Derek Stepan and Martin St. Louis; Henrik Lundqvist and always, always Mario Lemieux.

Listen hard and you can still hear the sad cadence of longtime radio play-by-play broadcaster Ron Weber, who had to describe the expansion Caps of 1974-75, the worst team in NHL history, or talk fans through another painful playoff ending. There were so many of them even in those days, so many times the Capitals had the look of a championship team only to sabotage themselves.

“We got our fair share of breaks this time — usually they were stacked the other way,” said team president Dick Patrick, who has been with the organization for 36 years dating back to the “Save the Caps” campaign run by original owner Abe Pollin in 1982 to keep the team in the District.

Down 2-0 in the first round to the Columbus Blue Jackets, Cam Atkinson hit the post in overtime of Game 3. Eller took advantage of that break and scored the winner in double overtime and Washington was back in the series. It finished the playoffs 16-6 after digging that early hole.

“We never make it easy, do we? But, man what a group of guys and what a performance from a lot of individuals,” defenseman Matt Niskanen said. “We played together, showed a lot of character, boy. You know, that’s something we got criticized for in the past, I think. We showed a ton of it this spring.”

They celebrated for an hour on the ice with a few thousand Capitals fans in the building down at ice level now, cheering “Let’s Go Caps!” and chanting for Smith-Pelly — “D-S-P!” — and Holtby and Ovechkin over and over until their voices grew hoarse.

At one point Ovechkin saw an old teammate on the ice and called over: “Olaf! Olaf!”

Olie Kolzig, the goalie the only other time the Capitals reached the Stanley Cup Final, saw Ovechkin and smiled. Kolzig was the voice in the locker room early in Ovechkin’s career, a man imposing enough to call out the young superstar when he was out of line. They were 20 feet apart with a mob in between them and so they laughed and did simultaneous fist pumps.

“I’m just so proud of what they’ve done,” Kolzig said. “I know how hard it is to get here. I know how hard it is to win once you do.”

T.J. Oshie, whose relentless play helped fuel Washington’s playoff comeback, spoke of his father, Tim, who is fighting Alzheimer’s disease. He doesn’t remember too well these days, but he was in the arena Thursday, walking unsteadily on the ice with a cane. Oshie’s voice broke as he described his father.

“What a great human being, what a great man, what a great father,” Oshie said. “Some things slip his memory these days, but this one is going to be seared in there. I don’t think any disease is going to take this one away from him.”

Oshie said he began sobbing on the bench even before the clock ran out. The tears weren’t done yet.

“I didn’t know I was such a baby,” Oshie joked.

He was far more collected when he found his dad later and the two men took a picture together with the Stanley Cup.

All around the rink, players, coaches and staff shared the moment with their families. Kids crashed to the ice. Jay Beagle was called away to care for his young son, who had taken a hard fall and was just generally ready for bed.

“I can’t believe this happened,” one assistant coach said to his wife.

Video coordinator Brett Leonhardt, who once worked for the team website and memorably filled in as an emergency goalie during a 2008 game when a minor league recall couldn’t make it in time, caught up with reporters whom he is known for a decade. You couldn’t wipe the smile off his face.

Finally, media obligations done and ready to move on, Ovechkin grabbed the Cup and skated toward the bench. He briefly spoke with Backstrom and they hatched a plan to get every player into the locker room. Ovechkin would carry the Cup in and the real party would begin.

Like a disgruntled parent, the captain yelled at teammates to stop their conversations and get in the locker room. Rookie Nathan Walker, who should have a day with the Cup in his native Australia sometime this summer, skated past as instructed. Brett Connolly took a little more prodding. Finally content all were in place, Ovechkin lifted the Cup one last time, kissed it and turned to the assemblage.

“Thank you, Vegas!” Ovechkin yelled.

Then he disappeared down the tunnel toward his waiting teammates, their long work finally done.

is a senior staff writer and co-founder of The Sports Capitol. He is also an award-winning multimedia journalist, who has covered the Redskins, Capitals and Nationals for the Washington Examiner, Washington Times and 106.7 The Fan and major events like the Super Bowl, NCAA basketball tournament, Stanley Cup playoffs, NBA playoffs, NFL Combine and NFL Draft.

Source