#jeff halpern

“...to keep climbing the standings is something we want to continue.”

Yeah, Jeff Halpern’s the only hometown DMV boy who comes to mind (from where I grew up!) and it’s just a really cool thing. There’s been a number of articles over the years about the Capitals, and more specifically Ovechkin, driving the rise of interest in ice hockey in the DMV area in kids.

(Of course, you see articles and trends like this for other cities that have elite players for a franchise– some places are given more focus than others, not that we need to get specific– but I think the Washington DC trend is all the more impressive, given the franchise’s lack of championship success before last season, geographic location, and the racial/economic demographics of some of these areas showing the rise.)

He still smiles every time he’s asked to recall his rookie season. The team’s inside joke was that its record was so poor, the Capitals were eliminated in October. But that collection of largely journeymen NHLers raised and influenced a young Ovechkin who needed help navigating sudden stardom.

Then when Ovechkin arrived in Washington a few weeks before training camp, he wore ripped cutoff jean shorts and a too-tight T-shirt to an informal skate. “He looked like a mess,” Halpern said, describing it as like the scene from the movie “Slap Shot” in which teammates encountered the outrageous Hanson brothers for the first time. “We played the Flyers at some point in preseason, and he scored a goal and skated by their bench and winked at their bench,” Halpern said. “I was like, ‘Oh, this guy is going to get us killed.’ ”

Ovechkin requested that he have a North American roommate on the road that season to help him adapt to the culture and learn the language, so he was paired with Willsie. “He handle me pretty well,” Ovechkin said with a chuckle. Coach Glen Hanlon charged Willsie with being Ovechkin’s chaperon and making sure he got to the arena on time after their routine trip to Starbucks. Willsie was endeared by Ovechkin’s childlike love for playing, a quality he still has at 32, but he also wanted to teach Ovechkin how to be professional, whether it was getting to bed by a certain time or making sure they had a healthy meal for dinner. “I got told by Glen Hanlon, ‘Just don’t lose him,’ ” Willsie said. “He was like a puppy in those towns — you just don’t want to lose him....

Ovechkin repeatedly wore tight red jeans to practice, “and finally someone said, ‘We need to stop with the tight red jeans and take him shopping,’ ” Willsie said with a laugh. On the team’s first trip to New York, Ovechkin asked Willsie to direct him to the fashion strip and go shopping with him. Ovechkin kept trying to buy Willsie some new clothes, but Willsie insisted on just waiting for him by the door.

“It was his first time playing in Toronto, and our regular routine was to go morning skate, come back for lunch and then have a nap and then we’d go back to the game,” Willsie said. “This time, we finished our meal and we’re getting ready for our nap, and it was around Christmastime in Toronto and he was so excited that we were finally playing Toronto. So, he says, ‘I’m going to walk around.’ I said, ‘Are you sure?’ He’s like, ‘Yep, I can’t sleep.’ He was gone the whole afternoon. I don’t know where he went.”

The sport prides itself on its players’ humility, and though teammates would occasionally tease Ovechkin that first year — “He showed up with blue neon lights underneath his car one day, and we all thought that was pretty funny,” Bradley said — they never wanted to destroy his zeal. It made them look forward to what he might do the next game and the one after that. One thousand games into his career, that wonder and that anticipation remain.

“How do you control a guy like that? How do you tell a guy not to be excited about playing hockey?” Halpern said.