While it’s not unheard of for teams to trade their captains, it’s still pretty awkward to do so. In the past NHL season, the San Jose Sharks stripped Patrick Marleau of his captaincy in favor of Rob Blake and now the Washington Capitals have suddenly traded their team captain of 3 years, Chris Clark, to the Columbus Blue Jackets for Jason Chimera (Caps’ D-man Milan Jurcina also went with Clark as part of the trade).

At first I was surprised. Not so much because Clark himself was traded–I never found him to be a particularly integral part of the lineup–but because he was their captain, a designation that ought to be somewhat hallowed. In the case of Marleau, despite a franchise-best season in 08-09, the Sharks were eliminated from the first round of the playoffs by an 8th seeded team which capped off a third consecutive year of playoff disappointments having been prematurely eliminated in the second round of the Pacific Conference semifinals in every year post-lockout. The Sharks clearly needed a shake-up and their GM promised, and delivered on, a series of major moves. With that in mind, Marleau’s loss of the captaincy was contextually appropriate. Chris Clark, on the other hand, was leading a team full of young talent and solid, veteran skaters which looks to be an extremely solid Stanley Cup contender. Surely Clark was doing something right. Right? Consider this: between an aggravating groin injury and a broken wrist, Clark had not played a full season since the 2006-2007.

I have this thing about captaincy. I don’t think the captain of a team needs to (or necessarily should be) the most skilled player. My junior and senior years of high school, I was captain of our varsity field hockey team and I was captain of my roller derby team the first two years of our league’s existence. Generally, I don’t classify myself as a leader but I feel as if I did a great job captaining both teams (except when our roller derby team lost the championship in the last two minutes of the bout TWO YEARS IN A ROW! But that’s a tearful story for another time). Through my years in roller derby, I saw captains for all three other teams come and go. Ours was the only one to be captained (and co-captained as I cannot forget my awesome accomplice, Tara) by the same two people without interruption AND ours was the only team without massive amounts of drama which, as any rollergirl can tell you, can be an impossible feat. I’m not saying any of this to brag, only to illustrate what solid and structured captaincy can do for a team.

Regardless of whether or not I think they chose the right man for the job, I don’t think it’s coincidental that the Capitals entered a 3-game losing slump beginning on the day they traded Chris Clark nor do I think it’s coincidental that they broke out of that streak the day they named Ovechkin their new captain.You need a captain who is on the rink with you. They need to understand every aspect of the team. A captain is not just someone who shows up in the locker room on game day and gives a pep talk, they need to be there sweating through a really hard practice alongside his teammates. He needs to be on the bench banging his stick when a teammate wins a momentum-changing fight. He needs to be in the locker room after practices and games, joking around with teammates, celebrating wins and bouncing back from losses. He needs to be one of the hardest working guys on the team. I don’t think you can have it any other way.

(And for a great post on Captain Ovechkin, check out @KellyinDC’s great post over at Love the Game)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Capitals Friday. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.