(Ed. Note: As the Stanley Cup Playoffs continue, we're bound to lose some friends along the journey. We've asked for these losers, gone but not forgotten, to be eulogized by the people who knew the teams best: The bloggers who hated them the most. Here is Puck Daddy’s own Ryan Lambert, fondly recalling the Washington Capitals. Again: This is a roast and you will be offended by it, so don't take it so seriously.)

We are gathered here today to mourn not only the loss of the Washington Capitals, but also the loss of their chances of reasonably competing for a Stanley Cup any time in even the relatively near future.

You tend to hear a lot of talk about how one team or another has a "window" in which they can reasonably win the Stanley Cup. San Jose, for example, has had its window open and close so many times — by the media's reckoning — that Doug Wilson finally installed a revolving door to save on energy.

Another team for whom we hear entirely too much about their "window" is the Washington Capitals.

But the thing about that is if it was open at all any more (and frankly, it probably wasn't), it was open in the way that smokers crack their window on the highway, and that horrible high-pitched sound of wind rushing in so loud that you can't hear the radio any more was the voice of a thousand Alex Ovechkin apologists who wanted nothing more than for that incredible back half of the season to once again be reality, rather than outlier.

Just as death is inevitable, so too was this result; the kind of slow, heavy train you could feel coming miles away if you touched your hand to the track, its whistle a deep and mournful cry carried to you by the wind.

Of course the Capitals were going to trip in the first round. It couldn't happen any other way. Because, with the Capitals goes the Southeast Division, and nothing in the history of hockey has ever been more fitting than the last-ever champion of the worst division in the history of professional sports than losing at home to a six-seed that finished the regular season with one fewer point.

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Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

One of the things people said constantly throughout the Pittsburgh Penguins' six-game series victory over the New York Islanders was that their play was well below the expected level of quality.

In fact, the most common refrain was that this particular brand of awful play -- rife with defensive irresponsibility and baffling lack of execution for a team that was pretty much incredible from start to finish this year -- was probably only good enough to get them past a try-hard pretender like the Islanders.

Against a real team, it was generally agreed, this kind of play would result in them losing the series in short order, probably pretty badly.

But that kind of talk ignores two things. First, we were told repeatedly by just about everyone that if there was any team the Penguins, not exactly fleet-of-foot, didn't want to take on in the playoffs, it was these New York Islanders. And yeah, they had their hands full throughout, but still never really looked to be in all that much trouble; the scores were close, yes, but they still only needed six games to put these guys out of their misery.

Second, and more important, is that — lo and behold — the second they took Marc-Andre Fleury out of the crease, they won both games. That's not to say that Tomas Vokoun really won them either game, because he didn't. He posted a shutout in Game 5 because almost any goaltender in the world (with at least one notable exception) would have, but he was also victimized on occasion by the bad defensive work that didn't help Fleury much either.

But the fact of the matter is that if you have pretensions of winning a Stanley Cup, your goaltender has to at least be league-average. The Penguins, with their galaxy of stars and excellent coach and top-quality GM, have that goal. They do not have that goaltender. People will argue that Fleury is a winner, insofar as he won a Stanley Cup. Four years ago. Since that postseason, when he posted just a .908 save percentage and a not-good 2.61 GAA, his save percentage has crept above .899 precisely zero times. This year, when he gave up 14 goals on 128 shots in four games before Bylsma dead-bolted the door to the doghouse from the outside.

Or at least, he should; there's only so many times an entire team can roll its eyes and think, "Oh no, not again," like a pot of petunias, before it's the only reasonable course of action.

I don't know how much longer we need to suffer through the narrative that Fleury is any good at all before it crumbles to sand and is scattered by the wind. That is, if it hasn't done so already behind save attempts like this and this and most notably this.

I mean, look, the fact of the matter is that apart from one good playoff run five years ago in which he fell a game short of winning the Stanley Cup for that not-quite-ready Penguins team, he has always been sub-average, and now things are getting markedly worse.

Getty ImagesTrending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

Hockey fans are, in my experience, the most conspiratorially-inclined of any group like them, and so it should be no surprise that in the course of these playoffs we've already seen numerous accusations of bias playing into the results of entire series.

These accusations aren't coming not from fans on Twitter or, worse, SportsYapper, who always have a roll or two of tinfoil ready so Gary Bettman's HAARP system cannot read or control their brainwaves; but, rather, from actual respected news sites where respectable writers post their thoughts on the goings-on for their teams is, well, silly.

Homerism is always going to exist in sports media, just by the nature of what the job requires: Reporters are around the guys whose work they must critique just about every day for literally half the year, and talk to them, and grow familiar with them, and in many cases come to like them. And honestly, the stuff you read now, in 2013, is far less fraught with rah-rah gamers and bad-luck bemoaning that reports of yesteryear contained.

Which is what makes stuff like Jason Botchford's petulant boo-hooism earlier this week — hilariously entitled "The Canucks got screwed by the refs. Of course they did." — stand out as being so peculiar.

We know the Vancouver area is at its heart one that feels the world closes in around it whenever things go even slightly sideways, but nothing in the media has, to my knowledge, ever been quite so avert in its accusations.

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Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

No one is going to sit here and disagree that wide-open hockey is preferable to the brand displayed by teams trying to grind out wins.

No one likes board play. No one likes a thousand guys standing in the neutral zone during breakouts. No one — as we learned when the Rangers did it last year — likes the focus to be on blocking shots. No one likes obstruction.

For this reason, we are told so very often that the most important things officials can do in the playoffs is "let the boys play."

It's a fun concept. When the whistles are away, teams are allowed to play at 5-on-5 hockey which is obviously the best way to determine which is better. Ideally, all 60 minutes of every playoff game would be played at even strength. But the problem with this insistence on letting guys play is that when you do so, they tend to start committing penalties, and that, in turn, necessitates that, at some point, some of the infractions actually have to be called.

So while it's all well and good to say that for the sanctity of any individual game to be upheld, the referees should certainly not start blowing the whistle and sending guys to the box, the fact of the matter is that it's their jobs to do so. Guys break the rules, guys go to the box.

This, for some reason, doesn't make sense to people at all times.

Take, for example, Brian Strait's penalty on Sidney Crosby in overtime yesterday afternoon, a call which resulted in the Penguins' power play overtime game-winner. That it was called in overtime was somehow this egregious thing, according to Mike Milbury and Jeremy Roenick and a thousand thousand Internet commenters, a decision made by a referee overstepping his bounds.

Had this call — which was the right one because Strait got beat on the inside, took his hand off his stick and pulled Crosby down from behind, easy-ish fall or not — been made in the first period, the number of eyebrows it raised around the hockey universe would have been precisely zero. This is the kind of thing that typically happens when a coach puts a decent enough defenseman like Brian Strait on the ice in a high-leverage situation against a generational talent like Sidney Crosby, after all.

But that it happened in overtime was somehow outrageous.

Getty ImagesTrending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

I've seen it said that a big reason for the blowouts is that the Toronto Maple Leafs and New York Islanders are inexperienced. That could be it. But perhaps it's more likely that these are just not very bad teams running into very good teams, as they are wont to do in the early rounds of the playoffs.

Such is the problem with watching the Eastern Conference for the majority of the year, because you start to take for granted just how good teams that finish at the bottom of the playoff pool really aren't. You'll note that the Islanders came into the postseason as one of the streaking-est teams in the league, if not the outright hottest, having taken points from all but two of their final 17 games, 11 of which were played away from Nassau Coliseum.

Despite this, very few people gave them much of a shot of beating the Penguins, and deservedly so. The Penguins are far and away the second-best team in the league, and actually entered the playoffs on the upswing from their already exceptional majority of the regular season. Anyone who picked them to win the series in more than, say, five games was being absurdly generous to the Islanders for reasons that seem difficult to grasp.

So it came as no surprise to most that the Islanders went out in Game 1 and got their heads caved in. The game ended 5-0 but could have been a lot worse; the Penguins barely had their legs under them to start and the Islanders had most of the early possession, and predictably did nothing with it. By the time Pascal Dupuis scored midway through, the game had already been turned on its ear by a Beau Bennett opening goal against the run of play.

Yeah, shots finished at 26 apiece but anyone who watched it saw that the biggest positive for the Islanders is that James Neal might now be out for a while thanks to a hit from Travis Hamonic. That's not much to take away from a game in which you looked hopelessly unprepared and overmatched.

Getty ImagesHello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

The thing that's great about the Stanley Cup Playoffs is that any team can knock off any other one, regardless of seeding or apparent quality. A seven-game series is short, obviously, but it seems as though the NHL produces more postseason upsets on a regular basis than baseball, basketball or football.

But this year, I don't care about any of that. I want the favorites to lay waste to the competition with displays of power both horrible and impressive, so that they can meet for what could be the most entertaining Cup Final in years. The Chicago Blackhawks and Pittsburgh Penguins are the runaway best teams in the League this year and with good reason: They're deep everywhere and very, very good at everything. Playing each other for the best trophy in sports would produce by far the most attractive hockey in these playoffs.

Just think about it: Both teams' first two lines might be the best top-six groups in the sport, with the Penguins having bolstered theirs at the deadline, and the Blackhawks having entered the season with theirs. They're just so deep up front. Pittsburgh has 11 players with 20 or more points this season; Chicago nine. Their D corps are likewise both very deep, though you'd probably prefer to have Joel Quenneville's guys than Dan Bylsma's.

In net, Corey Crawford's numbers obviously stand out this season, but it wasn't so long ago that his save percentage was below league average, and that leads one to suspect he's more or less at Marc-Andre Fleury's level overall, which is to say slightly above average.

I understand that it's not fun to root for the clear No. 1 seeds who were the only teams to break 70 points in the standings, but they're the heavy favorites for a reason. Pummeling eight- and five-seeds and four-seeds isn't the most exciting path to the Final, and all the romanticizing of the underdog story from the Kings last season shows exactly why. But when you don't have a rooting interest, fans should want to see the most interesting hockey possible, and Blackhawks/Penguins is most certainly that. I'm willing to sit through a mediocre, unsurprising first three rounds if the Final is a classic.

A fully operational Penguins team taking on the Presidents' Trophy-winning Blackhawks are all anyone should ever want or need out of these playoffs, because it would be absolutely gorgeous.

Getty ImagesTrending Topics is a column that looks at the week in hockey, occasionally according to Twitter. If you're only going to comment to say how stupid Twitter is, why not just go have a good cry for the slow, sad death of your dear internet instead?

The Hart Trophy race has heated up, thanks in large part to Sid Crosby missing a quarter of the season. This week, I made the apparently unforgivable mistake of saying that anyone who would discount a player's chances for winning the award based on their not having made the playoffs "idiotic."

The argument that if you didn't make the playoffs, you shouldn't get MVP consideration is essentially this: The only thing worthwhile in hockey is more or less whether you make the playoffs. That's why you play an 82-game regular season, and if you don't succeed in doing so in the course of that season, then your value automatically reverts to zero.

The reason this was brought up at all was because there was some talk about the candidacy of Columbus Blue Jackets goalie Sergei Bobrovsky, who certainly merits consideration but whose team is very much on the bubble of playoff contention at this late date in the season.

The school of thought among the incorrect people who think he should win the award is pretty obvious: Look at how bad Columbus is, but look where they are despite being bad.

There is an apparently-sizable group of Professional Hockey Writers Association voters who would, at the end of the season, look at Bobrovsky's numbers, with the sky-high save percentage and sweet and lowdown goals-against average, and have two different opinions of them depending on where his (once again) not very good team finishes.

If they get to 55 points and take the final playoff spot because Detroit falters in its final game, then his efforts to get a club with one of the worst offenses in the were indeed quite valuable.

But if they get to 55 points and Detroit either matches or exceeds that total, then he, like everyone else that didn't make the playoffs, had no actual value whatsoever, at least in terms of assessing qualifications for this award.

Of course, this goes without mentioning that some people also don't think goalies should be able to win the Hart at all, because if you were basing the award on straight-up value, a goalie would win it every year since they play 60-plus minutes a night for something like three-quarters of the season or more. That's a palatable argument, and I agree that in most cases a goaltender should have to blow everyone else's doors off to merit consideration. I don't think Bobrovsky has done that.

Getty ImagesHello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

Puck Daddy's daily Death Watch posts have become essential reading for me in a very short period of time because the races to see who can squeeze into the playoffs have been particularly fascinating this season.

Not that this is the kind of thing I think we should be saying too loudly, lest Gary Bettman and his cadre hear, but I've really come to enjoy the fact that this is a 48-game season instead of an 82-gamer. Each loss is that much more agonizing, each win that much more likely to bring a postseason berth. There's something to be said for the cold brutality of the natural selection that emerges over the course of a six-month season as opposed to one that runs three and a half, because it does a lot to ensure that the best teams possible are competing for the Stanley Cup. But seeing all these bad ones white-knuckle it has been fascinating.

The East is a conference with its playoff teams all but decided at this point, though Winnipeg has the slimmest glimmer of hope for unseating Washington atop the abysmal Southeast. Nonetheless, the fact that a team like New Jersey was hanging around at all says a lot about the type of competition they were facing.

It has given teams hope they almost certainly wouldn't have had otherwise, and allowed not-great teams like the Maple Leafs to secure a playoff spot they would almost assuredly have lost were it not for the fact that the calendar saved them from statistical correction running them down and sinking its teeth into their throat like a cheetah on the Serengeti.

The West, as you might expect given the generally higher quality of the teams involved therein, is far more interesting, insofar as the Blue Jackets, the team that spent most of the week in eighth place, has also spent pretty much that entire time with less of a chance of sneaking in than the Red Wings lurking directly behind them.

This, too, is somewhat a function of the shortened schedule: Games in hand simply mean far more than they do in an 82-game schedule, and holding on with slipping, whitening fingertips to that final playoff spot for a week has meant all the more given the number of games currently being packed into your average seven-day period this time around as opposed to the norm.

Normally, I'm all for seeing teams not good enough for a playoff appearance having their hopes scuttled on jagged rocks as soon as humanly possible, so everyone can get on with the business of watching hockey that's actually compelling in any way. But because of all these atypically tight races, even the games featuring otherwise bad teams are coming off as interesting and even lively.