The Washington Capitals had just clinched the Southeast Division title and a playoff spot, the Verizon Center crowd was roaring and George McPhee went to congratulate his players as they came off the ice.
McPhee greeted Sergei Fedorov — a Capitals player for just six weeks but a veteran who knows the good guys from the bad — and Fedorov stopped.
“Congratulations to you, George,” Fedorov said. “Good for you.”
Saturday night’s victory over the Florida Panthers brought different rewards for different folks in the organization — owner Ted Leonsis, coach Bruce Boudreau and superstar Alex Ovechkin.
For McPhee, the club’s general manager, the reward was simple: He finally could take a deep breath.
“This is the first day I can exhale,” McPhee said.
McPhee could have been referring to the remarkable and tense season-ending run — the Caps won 11 of their final 12 games — that put his club back into the playoffs. He just as easily could have meant the four-plus months since Thanksgiving Day, when he fired coach Glen Hanlon after a 6-14-1 start and hired Boudreau to replace him.
“I remember telling him, ’You do whatever you have to do to win,’ ” McPhee said. “He said, ’I’ve got some ideas.’ He said it in such a confident way, it was like that was almost a moment right there.”
The sense of relief McPhee, in his 10th year as the club’s GM, now feels is something he really has been waiting for since 2003, when the Capitals were ousted by Tampa Bay in Washington’s last playoff appearance.
“When we got eliminated in the playoffs against Tampa that year, we talked a few weeks after the season,” McPhee said. “Ownership felt at that time we should tear it down. We were probably going to have a lockout, so let’s rebuild it. They asked me, ’Can you do it, and will you do it?’
“We were sitting in Ted’s office. I said, ’Yes, we will.’ The process is a lot harder to go through, but when they back you up the way they did and you feel like you can take your time and build it right. … You want talented guys, gritty guys, high-character people.”
You also want to be in the right place at the right time, to hit the jackpot on all of those ingredients.
For McPhee, that place and time was Halifax, Nova Scotia, six years ago — the first time he saw a young Russian kid named Alex Ovechkin.
“He stood out because he never stopped,” McPhee said. “His engine just kept going. It didn’t matter whether they were playing a team that they were beating 15-1 or down 2-1. He just kept going.”
When Ovechkin became eligible for the draft, McPhee went to the Czech Republic to get a handle on that character ingredient. He already knew about the grittiness and the talent.
“I wanted to talk to him but not when he was coached by agents or anyone else,” McPhee said. “I wanted to get him alone to see what he was about. I stayed in the hotel where they were playing and grabbed him coming through the lobby one day and asked, ’Can you talk to me?’ It was great that he could sit down and carry on a conversation like an adult and was mature beyond his years. I thought, great player, great character.”
McPhee might have taken a deep breath June 26, 2004, the day the Capitals drafted Ovechkin. But rebuilding requires more than one brick, even if Ovechkin possessed the potential to be one of the best players ever to take the ice.
McPhee’s breathing also might have improved July 14, 2005, the day he hired Boudreau to coach the Caps’ American Hockey League club, the Hershey Bears.
“When we were doing the interviewing process for Hershey, we had eight candidates,” McPhee said. “We were going to interview four one week and four the next week. Bruce was the last one in the first week. As soon as we interviewed him, we said there was something about this guy. Then the lockout ended, and we had to get to work, so we went with this guy.
“He is authentic. He is one of a kind. The great thing about him is that he never panics. If you are going to beat this team, you have to beat them. They are not going to choke.”
No one is choking today.
Take a deep breath, George.
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