When I got back to Washington midweek, I was happy to find that both Dmitry Chesnokov from Sovetsky Sport, and John Keely, better known as Pucks and Boooks over at On Frozen Blog, were both up for getting together to tie up some loose ends.
On Sunday, we were all guests on the Capital Fanatic podcast, as we went on for about 45 minutes talking about development camp, the team's prospect pipeline and what look to be a number of desperate battles for players to make the squad in training camp.
Finishing up the podcast, it was hard not to come away with the feeling we could have gone on for another 45 minutes or more, which is exactly what we did for a couple of hours on Friday night at a bar downtown. One of the things we talked about was how the Caps might be able to market their Russian and Swedish stars to those local ex-pat communities.
Apparently, there are plenty of Russian ex-pats in the area, and Dmitry seems to think they'd be pretty excited to come out and support countrymen like Alex Ovechkin, Alexander Semin and the newly signed Viktor Kozlov if they were only asked. In cities like New York and Boston, ethnic heritage nights are a staple of the baseball promotional calendar. Maybe it's time for a Russian Heritage Night at Verizon?
At one point, the conversation turned to our favorite hockey moments. Here's a nice clip that Dmitry suggested: An Andrei Markov goal from 1999 when he was with Dynamo Moscow.
Once I said goodbye to Dmitry and John on Friday evening, I thought I was in for a quiet weekend, but it turned out I was wrong.
I seem to remember seeing one like that on an early Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em video. I want to say Ray Borque on Peter Sidorkiewicz, in Boston, but I’m not 100% sure who the shooter was.
Also, for those who don’t read Cyrillic, the assist went to Maxim Afinogenov.