Will someone wake up the Washington Post's sports columnists and tell them the Caps are a good story?

One of my favorite topics to blog about over the years has been the Washington Post's hockey coverage--because not many people really care about it, even fewer also blog about it (one of the guys at On Frozen Blog, but that's about it) but also because no one pays more attention to it than me. (That's not necessarily a good thing or particularly healthy, but it's just the truth and I can't help it.)

The day-to-day beat coverage of the Caps and the placement of stories on days after games--and features on off-days--is fine and I have no complaint about that. My problem is with the columnists at the Post, who seem to have abandoned the Caps as the team spent the last month and a half going from a group in disarray to a red-hot team that looks like it may have a decent shot at making waves in the playoffs. Sounds like a good story that a sports columnist would be interested in, doesn't it?

And yet somehow there have been FOUR TIMES as many columns written about the Nats in the last month and a half than about the Caps, even though the Nats didn't play their first game of the season until this past Thursday. Now I like the Nats, I follow the Nats and I read most of those columns. But Tom Boswell, the most senior and best Post sports columnist, wrote 13 columns about the Nats since spring training started (including a couple containing such ridiculous optimism about the team that I think family members of Nats players made fun of them.) I know there's a romanticism about spring training, but that's a lot of columns about practice. In that same time period, he wrote one about the Caps (to be fair, it was a good one.) He wrote the same number of columns about the Orioles in that time period.

(By the way, all these column numbers are approximate, because the Post's new website is so bad and hard to use that every columnist archive either was impossible to find or was missing columns that I remembered reading.)

So you say, did other columnists pick up the slack on the Caps while Boswell was delirious from sun poisoning in Florida? Actually, not really. Jason Reid, who just became a columnist in February and is already pretty good, went down to Florida and has written three columns already about the Nats (including a really good one Saturday about the change at the catching position). His tally of Caps columns since he began: zero. (He has written a few about the Wizards.)

How about Tracee Hamilton? The count on her from mid-February to now was three Wizards columns, three Nats columns and two Caps columns. Mike Wise has written no columns about the Caps since...I'm not sure, but not since Presidents' Day. John Feinstein wrote one in mid-Februrary, and went back to college basketball (which is fine, because that's his specialty, although he probably knows the most about hockey of all the sports columnists.) And finally, there's Sally Jenkins, who I don't think has written about hockey since the 1990s.

I'm sure if the Post editors were reading this, they would point to Tarik El-Bashir's "On Hockey" column as a substitute for Boswell, et. al. El-Bashir, who was formerly the Caps beat writer and now covers Georgetown basketball, knows a lot about hockey and his columns are always interesting and often deal with strategy, important issues within the team or how a particular player is doing. But half of them don't even appear in the print edition of the sports section. (Yeah, I know, at 40, I'm just about the youngest person that actually still reads the print edition, but let's face it: If a sports column doesn't appear in the print edition, it means the editors don't consider it as important as all the articles that did make it to print.) And as I said earlier, the Post web site is such a mess lately, it's pretty easy to miss stuff these days--I almost missed El-Bashir's web-only column last week because I'd been busy that day and hadn't had time to check the Caps Insider blog where it was linked until I was on my way to the game.

What makes me even more upset about this is all the great column ideas that any editor or columnist should be able to come up with but that aren't being written. There's the mystery of Alex Ovechkin (why did he have such a mediocre first four and a half months of the season and then all of a sudden look like himself again?). There's the mystery of Alex Semin (is any local athlete as mystifying, both in the ups and downs of his play and his refusal to ever be interviewed in English? Can someone follow him around for a day and see if he insists on speaking Russian to the woman behind the deli counter at Giant?) There's the mystery of the Caps' new defensive system (what exactly are they doing that's so different?) There's the mystery of the Caps goalie situation (there are a lot of fans who think the Caps' best goalie is currently playing in Hershey.) And then there's the obvious story for the last week of the season: Who should the Caps want to play in the first round of the playoffs? Who should they not want to play? I've heard hosts on sports radio lead discussions on this topic--the Post can't dive in?

The Post has certainly made some progress in their coverage of the Caps over the past few years--Dan Steinberg, of course, does some great feature stuff on the Caps, from Ovechkin getting pictures with Michelle Obama to why Baltimore is into the Caps. And I'm sure in the playoffs, we'll get some more Caps features from the Post and regular columns. But if the columnists aren't following the team during the year, are they going to have any idea what's going on when they have to write about the team in the playoffs when it matters? I guess we'll see when the playoffs start next week, but the paper's performance these past few months doesn't give me hope.

For Wilbon, it was time to go

I posted this as a comment on Dan Steinberg's D.C. Sports Bog, and a few other commenters seemed to like it, so I figured I'd post it here as my return to blogging about D.C. sports media. And since it originated as a comment on another blog, it's much shorter than my usual blog post. It's a reaction to Michael Wilbon's announcement that he's leaving the Washington Post to go full-time to ESPN after 32 years at the newspaper.

Michael Wilbon was once a very good columnist who I looked forward to reading after every Redskins game and other major sporting events, and 10 years ago he was probably the most important opinionmaker in D.C. sports. But anyone who tells you Wilbon's departure is a big loss for the Post either doesn't read the Post sports section regularly or doesn't care about D.C. sports.

In recent years since his PTI and ESPN fame--and especially since he stopped being a regular Monday morning Redskins columnist a few years ago--Wilbon has become almost completely detached from D.C. sports. He's written more columns about the Miami Heat in the last two months than he's written on the Caps and Nats combined the last two years. And every column he writes that isn't about the NBA is basically mailed in.

Even more troubling, in his columns and especially his chats, he's seemed to show a disrespect to D.C. sports fans, from his gratuitous, often lacking in fact, shots at Ovechkin to his attacks on Redskins fans for basically caring too much about the Redskins.

And the worst part is he doesn't even seem to read his own paper--or even his own columns. When he wrote earlier this year that Ovechkin "cannot" win a championship, he got asked about it in his chat and claimed he'd never written such a thing (this despite the fact that Steinberg had done a whole post on it). The most recent example of how out of touch he is was just this week, when someone asked in his chat about Colin Cowherd's comments regarding John Wall and his response was: "I hope you are accurately quoting Colin, and fairly summarizing his positions." This, of course, after Steinberg had written extensively about Cowherd's comments on this site, and a number of other writers had also slammed them in the sports world.

If a D.C. sports columnist can't even bother to read his own newspaper for news about the local sports teams he's supposed to be writing about, it's time for him to go work for ESPN full time.

We didn't get off to the best start

So Alexis Grace wasn't as good as the judges said she was, but she was still probably the clear best girl on Tuesday night. And the same goes for Danny Gokey--he wasn't deserving of the whooping and hollering from Paula, Randy and Kara, but he was good, and with his backstory (but please, friend of Danny Gokey, holding up a photo of Danny and his late wife for the camera may be starting to push it), it was clear he was going to the final 12. But Michael Sarver? Wow, Simon has even more power than I thought. It's clear that his sort of odd endorsement of him Tuesday night--when he clearly isn't much more than a middle of the pack singer in the group and a pleasant but far from memorable vocalist--must have helped push him over the edge. I mean, really, was there anything special about his performance Tuesday night or Wednesday night that said to you, "Hey, this guy can win American Idol?" All I said was, "This guy might, if he's lucky, finish tenth."

And it's a shame, because there were at least two other singers, Anoop and Ricky Braddy, who were better than him last night and just generally have better voices. And Ricky used to serve chicken fingers--is that so much better than being an oil roughneck or whatever it is that they've told us about Michael to garner sympathy for him? I presume Anoop and Ricky will be brought back for the wildcard round, but who knows how many other good singers they'll have to battle against? By the way, my other picks for possible wildcards in the group would be Tatiana and perhaps Ann Marie. And speaking of wildcards, why did they do that to poor Tatiana? When they said Anoop and Michael were within 20,000 votes of each other (the most information they've ever given out about a semifinal voting contest), it was clear that they were two and three in the guys, and that Danny was number one (because there's no way he was behind both of those guys.) That means Tatiana was no better than the fifth biggest vote getter overall, and yet they tried to make her think she might have gotten the most votes. Those AI producers--they just love to treat people cruelly for our amusement.

But I'm not angry. I spent the night at the Capitals hockey game and saw Alexander Ovechkin score one of the most amazing goals you'll ever see--and certainly the best goal I've ever seen in person. Watch it here. It's much better than any performance from Tuesday night's Idol.

Fingerhut out.

The Washington Post still doesn't cover hockey

For two Saturdays in a row, the Washington Post's "Free for All" letters section has carried missives complaining of the Washington Post's poor coverage of the Stanley Cup playoffs since the Washington Capitals were eliminated in the first round. It was quite fitting that a letter appeared this past Saturday, because that was the day that the Post's hockey coverage reached an unbelievable nadir that will likely be impossible to surpass. I picked up Saturday's sports section, and wasn't surprised that it didn't have the results from the Friday night Stars-Sharks game, since it didn't start until 10 p.m. and went into overtime. But I realized I had never seen the final score of Thursday night's Wings-Avalanche game four, and the Post did have a brief article and box score for the Wings-Avs under a headline that said "Thursday's game." Amazingly, although the last time I checked that game on Thursday night, it had been 7-1 Detroit, the Post had a summary and box score that had the Wings winning 4-3. What a crazy third period that must have been, huh? No, actually the final score of game four was listed in the agate type as 8-2. The Post, under the headline of "Thurday's game," had actually printed a few paragraphs and the box score from Tuesday's game three. Yes, the Washington Post printed the box score from a game that had occurred four days before.

Now I work at a newspaper, and I know that at deadline mistakes honest mistakes can be made (although you'd like to think there'd be someone who was following hockey enough in the Post newsroom to catch this one). But even if the mistake was just the case of hitting the wrong button on the computer, it sure is a fitting symbol of the Post's coverage of the NHL since the Capitals were eliminated from the playoffs. I wrote a blog post back in January about how while the Post does a good job of covering the Caps, the newspaper has essentially given up on covering the league as a whole. The outdoor game on New Year's Day, which got lots of coverage in just about every major sports outlet, got a photo and a few sentences in the Post. But after the Caps's great run at the end of the season, and the remarkable interest it generated, the Post has apparently judged that there will be no greater interest in hockey now than there was in last year's hockey postseason, when it also got no staff coverage.

In fact, I think this year the coverage is actually worse. At least three times in the past week or so, I leafed through the sports section looking for the hockey box scores and they were so buried I didn't even see them the first time through. One time they were nestled under the girls high school lacrosse results, and today the 10 sentences and box score on the clinching game in the Flyers-Habs series was so buried in the bottom right corner of the final page of the sports section that I had to point it out to my dad--who had assumed the Post just didn't print anything on the game.

One might think that with this year's Eastern Conference finals matching two teams that are probably, historically, the Caps' biggest rivals--the Penguins and Flyers--there might be some interest in Washington in the series. But don't expect any coverage beyond those wire service articles in the Post. According to a posting by Caps beat writer Tarik El-Bashir on his blog (in answer to a question I posted), the paper apparently needs to save its hockey budget to cover the draft and awards ceremony, and thus only if the finals "feature a big market matchup, or some other juicy storyline, my editors may decide to dig deep. But that's not my call."

I'm glad to hear that El-Bashir will be at the draft and awards ceremony, but amazed that the paper's sports section--which, judging from the attention it gives to events like the Olympics and the way some of its columnists opine more on national issues than local teams, obviously considers itself a player in the national scene-- is skipping the NHL playoffs. (They didn't even print previews of the second round series, after taking almost a whole page with a preview of the first round.) So why absolutely no interest in a national sports league that by all accounts (TV ratings, buzz, hugely increased interest in the local team, column on the NHL by ESPN Sports Guy Bill Simmons, even) is on an upswing? I have no idea. (Even the Washington Times had a staff-written article on Jaromir Jagr the other day. Hey, there's another local angle that's now gone.) But they're begging me to go elsewhere to read about the NHL playoffs. I guess I will.

More on this issue coming up in another post.