What if Ted Leonsis and Dick Patrick elected to go outside of the organization in 2014 when they promoted then-assistant general manager Brian MacLellan to the GM's post to replace George McPhee? What if they didn't hire Barry Trotz to replace Adam Oates behind the bench?
Of the four NHL GM's whose team advanced to the conference finals in 2018, MacLellan was the only one who wasn't a finalist for the league's GM of The Year Award. Trotz won the 2016 Jack Adams Award as the coach " … adjudged to have contributed the most to his team's success," but he wasn't a finalist for the award this season.
What if MacLellan hadn't signed Orpik and Matt Niskanen in his first summer as GM, or if he hadn't dealt for Oshie in his second summer on the job? And what if - as the Tampa Bay Lightning braintrust recently did after the Caps ousted the Bolts in the Eastern Conference Final - MacLellan had opted to purge a member or two or three of Trotz's sagely, veteran coaching staff after the team fell short in a previous spring?
What if - in the wake of a third straight second-round playoff exit last spring - the Caps' upper management decided to "blow the whole thing up," trading away longtime members of the team's core to start all over as some fans and media types were urging them to do?
Eleven months ago, few would have foreseen a Caps' Cup championship in the cards less than a year off on the horizon. In addition to the expected losses of defensemen Karl Alzner and Kevin Shattenkirk and forwards Justin Williams and Daniel Winnik to free agency, the Caps also lost defenseman Nate Schmidt to the Golden Knights in the expansion draft and traded forward Marcus Johansson to New Jersey.
Many in the media and blogosphere vilified Caps management for those and other moves then and throughout the season, but less than a year after all that clattering, the Caps are in possession of the Stanley Cup. Washington's ownership and management deserves a lot of credit for its patience, its focus and its ability to shut out the surrounding noise and make what proved to be prudent and prescient decisions at crucial junctures, time after time.
