Lighting the Lamp: Capitals’ Stanley Cup win is great for hockey

Welcome to Lighting the Lamp, a year-round NHL column. This week, we’re looking back at the incredible five games of the Stanley Cup Final and looking ahead to the NHL Draft and free agency.

I didn’t know how much I wanted a Washington Capitals (really, an Alex Ovechkin) Stanley Cup win until it happened.

Something special happened in the NHL this season. The Stanley Cup Final was the most-watched in three years, drawing 4.80 million viewers on NBC and NBCSN.

You can attribute a lot of that to the expansion Vegas Golden Knights and the long-suffering Capitals, to be sure. But ratings and viewership numbers don’t tell us everything.

For instance, NHL regular season games averaged 417,000 viewers in 2017-18 on NBC, NBCSN and NBC’s digital platforms, which was down 12 percent from the 2016-17 season.

But NBCSN did not broadcast any NHL games between February 7-26 thanks to the 2018 Winter Olympics, so that’s a fairly large variable that affected viewership for the entire season.

The NHL typically suffers from going up against the NBA late in the season, but I haven’t talked to a single person who found the NBA Finals more compelling than the Stanley Cup equivalent this spring.

The best possible outcome of an admittedly surprising Final between the Golden Knights and Capitals would be that the casual hockey audience was reminded of just how fun this could be, and then tunes in accordingly next season.

This was my first season covering the NHL full time, and it’s been nothing less than a blast. We’ve assembled an incredibly funny, dedicated, talented team here at FanSided NHL, and we’ll be covering every inch of the league year-round, including the NHL Draft and Free Agency. Not to mention, we’ll be ramping up our Fantasy Hockey coverage considerably, including DFS. Vegas, baby!

There’s already a ton of fun content to read in those sections, so make sure to stay with us through the long, hot summer until the sounds of skates gliding on ice return to us. Thank you for reading!

NHL power rankings

Best city celebrations of a sports championship in my totally subjective opinion

5. 2010 New Orleans Saints. Post-Katrina, the city needed this.

4. 2018 Philadelphia Eagles. They only waited 57 years!

3. 2004 Boston Red Sox. Curse=reversed!

2. 2016 Chicago Cubs. Largest victory parade ever.

1. 2018 Washington Capitals, for now. If you’ve been on the Internet this week, you know why.

Lamp Lighters: The week’s best goals

This was some black magic by Backstrom and Ovechkin, and might be my favorite goal of the series (with the benefit of hindsight):

Top shelf, indeed:

Snuck that one right in there:

A Goalshie! FLIP!

Look at this effort from Ovechkin:

Ok, Shea:

Coast to Coast: What you might have missed around the league

• The Golden Knights, media darlings for their entire inaugural season, have fallen out of the spotlight since the Washington Capitals won the Stanley Cup. So you’d be forgiven if you missed this nugget: Veteran goaltender Marc-Andre Fleury, a huge (the biggest?) reason Vegas made it to the Final at all, wants to end his career with his new team.
• NHL veteran Ilya Kovalchuk is indeed eyeing a return to the league in 2018, and his search is focused on the Pacific Division at the moment. According to TSN’s Darren Dreger, Kovalchuk has met with the Los Angeles Kings and San Jose Sharks.
• The Toronto Marlies could clinch the AHL championship on Tuesday after defeating the Texas Stars 6-2 in Game 5 of the Calder Cup Finals Saturday.
• You can watch Alex Ovechkin and Braden Holtby continue their Stanley Cup celebration tour on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon Monday night…if they’re still breathing by then.

5-on-5

1. Johnny “Pie” McKenzie, one of the Boston Bruins’ O.G. (and greatest) pests, passed away at 80 years old. What he meant to the city that he helped bring two Stanley Cup championship teams in 1970 and 1972 is more than can be expressed here. He played without a spleen, he played with a fractured skull, he played through a separated shoulder. He was one of the best ones.

2. Now that Alex Ovechkin has gotten his Cup, who’s the next longest-suffering player still waiting? How about two? San Jose Sharks center Joe Thornton and Toronto Maple Leafs left wing Patrick Marleau will both enter their 21st seasons in the NHL in 2018-19. Marleau has withstood 1,575 regular-season games without hoisting the Cup; Thornton, 1,493.

3. The question of whether the NHL season should begin earlier is a tired one at this point, but this year, as I sat at a baseball game in 90-degree weather before covering Game 1 of the Stanley Cup Final, I couldn’t help but think, THIS DOESN’T MAKE ANY SENSE. There’s so much consternation that early-season NHL games would have to compete with the World Series, but no one seems to care that the tail end of the NBA regular season and subsequent playoffs cannibalize a huge chunk of the year’s best hockey. And watching hockey in 60-degree fall temperatures sounds a heck of a lot better than in 90-degree humidity. Maybe on patio, by a fire pit, with a pumpkin beer…?

4. Not to be a Debbie Downer, but sort of lost in the delicious chaos that is the Capitals’ Stanley Cup celebration right now are the decisions looming ahead for general manager Brian MacLellan this offseason. The biggest, of course, is whether the team will be able to re-sign defenseman John Carlson, who becomes an unrestricted free agent on July 1. Carlson played more minutes in these playoffs than any other Capital, averaging 25:38. He also surpassed all other Capitals defensemen in franchise history in playoff points, netting 55. As of now, the Capitals are projected to have $11,215,705 in cap space, per CapFriendly. Needless to say, losing Carlson would be a huge blow to a team that could remain a contender.

5. Speaking of Capitals front office moves, the team lost a lot of talent last offseason (exposing defenseman Nate Schmidt in the Vegas expansion draft, losing defensemen Karl Alzner and Kevin Shattenkirk and forward Justin Williams in free agency and trading forward Marcus Johansson to the New Jersey Devils). But MacLellan was able to ink forward Devante Smith-Pelly to a one-year contract for NHL minimum salary of $650,000. How’d that work out? Well, Smith-Pelly netted seven goals in the postseason and posted a 23.1 shooting percentage — the highest among all Capitals. Good work, MacLellan.

Tweet of the week

This might be the happiest I’ve ever been for someone who isn’t a member of my immediate family:

Is there something you want to see more of? Let me know in the comments or on Twitter @MichelleBruton. Want more hockey? Follow @FanSidedNHL on Twitter.