What a disgrace — Washington DC's Capitals hockey team came north to the Canadian capital city of Ottawa and lost with only 2 scoring shots against 5 for Canada's Senators. Yes, suddenly the National Hockey League's ordinary game becomes a contest between the overall hockey prowess of the countries' general sports values. That's not the way either team or the NHL plans it. The matter is just too much overpowered by the sport and, at the same t+m, the weit of metaphors that sweep fans up into a kind of nationalism. After all, it's the NHL teams from the two countries' capitals, with names like "Capitals" and "Senators" (which coud confuse Americans becawz so many of them don't even know theirs is not the only country that has an elected office of Senator ... well, actually in Canada, Senators (the political kind) are not elected but appointed (how regressive can you be?), while Senators (the hockey kind) are mostly bawt and sold with weird Get-off-the-Team-Now cards available, at least to some players who're discontented with where they've ended up. Now, Ottawa is not a very hospitable town, cold, and rather empty on the weekends. Much of the workweek's populace live across the river in Hull, Quebec, and some of them want a separate French-speaking country but do l+k Gringo and Anglo dollars that speak English. I mean Caps vs Senators sets a whole nationalistic lingo and metaphory in motion with decades of political overt+m suddenly made volatile in the fevered imaginations of fans in the icey North above the tree-line and the DEW-line. Okay, okay, I'm stretching it a bit.May I quote a sociologist of sport? Writing about hockey in Canada, Alan Bairner in his Sport, Nationalism, and Globalization: European and North American Perspectives (2001) reminds us,

Time and again, the cry goes up — hockey is Canada's game or, as the legend on countless T shirts woud have it, 'Canada is Hockey.' This is not to ignore the fact that it is played in numerous other countries. But implicit is the widely held belief that Canada and the Canadians have a special affinity with the game that is matched in no other country. For many years, it was also felt that the Canadians were undoubtedly the best hockey players in the world. By the 1960s, however, it had become apparent that the Russians as well as other Europeans and even Americans coud also play a bit. The result was a period of national soul searching. Victory [by Canada] in a challenge series against the Soviet Union in 1972 provided temporary relief. ... (page 134).

All of which pertains at least obliquely to the headline of Katie Carrera's article in Washington Post's online feature Post Sports which focusses on the absence of the Cap's Russian star Alex Ovechkin.

— Sportikos, refWrite Backpage sports columnist
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Wapo Post Sports (Feb22,2k12)
— Article intro reposted here with refWrite comment by SportikosFollow @Owlb
general editor, refWrite Backpage

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Capitals vs. Senators:

Without Ovechkin,

Washington drops third consecutive game,

with 5-2 loss in Ottawa

by Katie Carrera, Published: February 22

OTTAWA — To watch the Washington Capitals in recent days is to wonder when things went wrong for a team that five months ago was often mentioned as a can’t-miss candidate to make a long run in the postseason. Wednesday night, the Ottawa Senators became the latest opponent to benefit from facing the disjointed shell of a team the Capitals have become.

Washington fell, 5-2, to the Senators at Scotiabank Place in another game that featured a team hopelessly stuck in the quicksand of its own bad habits. Star winger Alex Ovechkin sat out with a lower-body injury but his absence had little impact on the outcome. The Capitals demonstrated little spark en route to another demoralizing defeat and didn’t offer much resistance until the contest was out of hand — both goals came after they trailed 4-0.

The Capitals (29-26-5, 63 points) had another opportunity to pull even with Florida atop the Southeast Division, as well as Toronto and Winnipeg in a tie for eighth in the Eastern Conference. Instead, they remain lodged in 10th in the East, having lost three straight and seven of their past 10.

“We’ve got to find a way to win games,” said Mathieu Perreault, who recorded one of Washington’s two goals. “Right now we’re out of the playoffs. We gotta find a way to get points no matter how we play. If we have a bad night, we have to find ways to tie games and do right things because right now it’s pretty awful.”

Considering the way they are limping toward Monday afternoon’s NHL trade deadline, it’s tough not to wonder whether General Manager George McPhee and team brass will opt to make more significant and numerous changes than it might have otherwise.

Read the full article in WaPo's Post Sports ....