Washington Capitals: Looking Back At The 2002-2003 Season
Mandatory Credit: Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports
The Washington Capitals are entering their 41st season as a franchise. To honor their tenure in the nation’s capital, we’ll write about every Washington Capitals season. Today, we remember 2002-2003 Washington Capitals season, which saw a Jaromir Jagr-led team in black and gold jerseys fall well short of expectations. In retrospect, the final six games that team played set off a domino effect that has shaped who the Caps are in 2015-2016.
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Coach Bruce Cassidy would lead the Caps to a modest 39-29-8-6 record and a second place finish in the Southeast division. It was a reasonably loaded offense with Jagr putting up roughly a point per game, Sergei Gonchar being awesome (think 2010 Mike Green) and Peter Bondra still producing 30 goals.
The playoffs that year, though, added yet another haunting chapter to Caps Spring folklore. They went up 2-0 in the first round on the Tampa Bay Lightning, pummeling them by a combined 9-3 in those two games, both on the road in St. Pete.
Then game three happened. I was at game three. I remember the fateful call in overtime, a weak stick infraction on Jagr, which sent the Caps down 5-on-3. The Lightning of course went on to score on the power play and win 4-3 as a stunned silence fell over the crowd. The Caps and Ted Leonsis changed forever after that.
The Caps lost the next three games in succession, never scoring more than once in a game. Martin St. Louis began his legacy as a Caps Killer, scoring the series winner in triple OT of game six. I had blocked that memory out until I had to research it for this article, so thanks for that, life.
Things were never the same after that. Leonsis was appalled at the low attendance and non-sellouts at home in that series. He thought bringing in Robert Lang, Jagr and others would sell tickets and simply couldn’t make sense of it.
The next year, there was a fire sale at the trade deadline. Jagr, Bondra, Lang, Gonchar, Hanlon…all gone. To this day it remains the most stunning and complete fire sale I’ve witnessed any of my favorite teams go through.
Leonsis, arguably, never really regained his faith in free agency after that until last offseason when Brian MacLellan became the GM and the Caps signed Brooks Orpik and Matt Niskanen. How many big name signings can you recall between then and 2003?
Back to 2003-2004, Leonsis, after the selloff, felt he got burned by the Jagr experience and gutted the entire freakin’ organization other than himself which led to the Alex Ovechkin era. To his credit, they committed to a full rebuild.
So to me, that’s 2002-2003’s lasting influence. If that Tampa Bay series had turned out differently, if Jagr hadn’t taken that penalty in game three, if St. Louis hadn’t broken out, there would have been no Ovechkin era.
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