Category: Capitals

I’m sure if I did the math to find out how much of my life is consumed by the Washington Capitals, it would be a relatively high number in proportion to just about everything else I do, including sleeping.

In the past week, I’ve seen all four Capitals games while attending two of them. In the past two days I read the book The Ovechkin Project, which the publisher sent me for review. Then I spent much of today, including the time during the Caps game, to write the review (I didn’t attend – my press partner Phil was there).

I got some great coverage the other night at the game, including a photo of Yi Jianlian of the Washington Wizards attending his first Caps game, and a quick article on Eric Fehr getting the player of the game but virtually being ignored by reporters after the game (though the Post made up for it with an article about him a day later). These and a couple of other quick articles got 2,000 page views on Wednesday, thanks to links by The Post, Japers’ Rink, a few basketball sites and others.

By the way, I was told that Capitals Outsider was the No. 1 hockey blog on the Fansided network for page views last month. That was flattering, but what’s scary is that it only took about 10 days for us to surpass last month’s total, so who knows what we’ll end up with. Even better, the compliments have been rolling in.

Whenever I plan on asking an offbeat question at a press conference after the Capitals game, I have to be really careful, especially with the timing and tone.

This time, I asked permission, and was told to wait toward the end of the press conference.

After the Caps’ 5-3 preseason win, the coach had a big smile on his face when I saw him downstairs. The press conference was a breeze, no hard questions, and Bruce was in a good mood.

When there was a break in the questions, I made my move.

“Coach, there’s been a lot of new commercials lately,” I began.

“Oh, shit,” he said, and the journalists started laughing (this isn’t the first time I’ve asked a question that led to an interruption of laughter).

I asked whose commercials were funnier and he sheepishly said Ovechkin is better at everything than him.

“But he hasn’t done bird calls,” Jill Sorenson of CSN said (I think it was her).

I thought it was hilarious, and I did get what I needed for my article. The photo is a screengrab from the video at the exact moment I mentioned ‘commercial.’

Sorry, Bruce, but if you’re going to make bird calls for Mercedes and dance on stage in sweats with Ryan Zimmerman, I’m going to ask you about it.

So long as you’re in a good mood.

I won’t be writing about that here. Instead, I wrote if for Storming the Crease. Rob Yunich is giving a forum to Caps bloggers to write about why they do what they do. Check it out.

The new local news site, TBD.com launched today, and I’m proud to say that Capitals Outsider is part of their network. At first, I was skeptical about TBD saturating an already crowded marketplace for local news, but they clearly took a huge step toward being different by reaching out to local bloggers. With washingtonpost.com and WTOP.com, not to mention other local news sites, I’m terribly unclear on how patch.com expects to get any page views with its just-launched local sites. While this is an exciting time to see these sites launching, the real test is to see if they can sustain themselves. Worst case, we’re looking at another frenzy of layoffs in a couple of years.