If the NHL were as embedded in the American sports culture as baseball, football, or basketball, the pain of the Washington Capitals would have been one for documentaries. Especially by the time 2018 rolled around. The Caps had the most prolific scorer in the league in Alex Ovechkin. They routinely racked up big regular season records. Yet just as routinely, they lost in the playoffs—and frequent losses to their hated rival from Pittsburgh only poured salt on the wound.
Washington fans insisted Ovechkin was the best player. Pittsburgh fans said that Sidney Crosby had the rings. The cultural scale wasn’t Tom Brady vs. Peyton Manning or Jordan vs. LeBron, but the contours of the debate were the same.
In ’18, the Capitals had their moment. Even better, they got it by going through Pittsburgh. They got it by rallying from 2-0 down in one series, and 3-2 down in another. Beating the expansion Vegas Golden Knights in the Finals sealed the run and lifted one of the biggest monkeys in sports off the franchise’s back and that of their best player.
The breakthroughs continued for two more years. The St. Louis Blues didn’t have the litany of playoff woe that Washington did, but they had never won the Stanley Cup and not even been to the Finals since 1970. A mid-season coaching change triggered a dramatic turnaround in 2019 that St. Louis rode all the way to a title.
Tampa Bay, with some of the great offensive talent in the sport, led by Steven Stamkos, had to feel like their window was closing. After the promise of reaching the Finals in 2015, the Lightning lost a pair of seven-game conference finals and suffered an embarrassing meltdown after a dominant regular season in 2019.
2020 had a strange feel to it, with the postseason played in the COVID-19 “bubble” without fans. But the Lightning weren’t complaining. It was where they finally went all the way. And if anyone wanted to put an asterisk by that Cup they came out and won another in 2021.
Tampa Bay’s dominance was an early sign that the NHL’s center of gravity was shifting toward the south and west as a new era began.