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The Washington Capitals are a professional ice hockey team based in Washington, D.C.. They are members of the Metropolitan Division of the Eastern Conference of the National Hockey League (NHL). Since their founding in 1974, the "Caps" have won one conference championship to reach the 1998 Stanley Cup Finals, and captured eight division titles. In 1997, the team moved their home hockey rink from the suburban Capital Centre to the new Verizon Center in Washington, D.C. Businessman Ted Leonsis has owned the team since 1999, and has revitalized the franchise by drafting star players such as Alexander Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom, and Mike Green. The 2009–10 Capitals won the franchise's first-ever Presidents' Trophy, for being the team with the most points at the end of the regular season. ==History== Along with the Kansas City Scouts, the Capitals joined the NHL as an expansion team for the 1974–75 season. The team was owned by Abe Pollin (also owner of the National Basketball Association's Washington Bullets/Wizards until his death on November 24, 2009). Pollin had built the Capital Centre in suburban Landover, Maryland, to house both the Bullets (who formerly played in Baltimore) and the Capitals. His first act as owner was to hire Hall of Famer Milt Schmidt as general manager. With a combined 30 teams between the NHL and the World Hockey Association (WHA), the available talent was stretched thin. The Capitals had few players with professional experience and were at a disadvantage against the long-standing teams that were stocked with veteran players. Like the other three teams who joined the league during the WHA era—the Scouts (now the New Jersey Devils), Atlanta Flames (now playing in Calgary), and New York Islanders—the Capitals did not factor the survival of the rival league into their plans. The Capitals' inaugural season was dreadful, even by expansion standards. They finished with far and away the worst record in the League at 8–67–5. Their 21 points were half that of their expansion brethren, the Scouts. The eight wins are the fewest for an NHL team playing at least 70 games, and the .131 winning percentage is still the worst in NHL history. They also set records for most road losses (39 out of 40), most consecutive road losses (37), and most consecutive losses (17). Head Coach Jim Anderson said, "I'd rather find out my wife was cheating on me than keep losing like this. At least I could tell my wife to cut it out." Schmidt himself had to take over the coaching reins late in the season. (Only once in NHL history has another team even come close to matching this futility: the 1980–81 Winnipeg Jets finished with nine wins and 57 losses, but a relatively impressive 14 ties.) In 1975–76, Washington went 25-straight games without a win and allowed 394 goals en route to another horrendous record: 11–59–10 (32 points). During the middle of the season, Max McNab was hired as the team's general manager, and Tom McVie was hired as head coach to replace Schmidt. For the rest of the 1970s and early 1980s, the Capitals alternated between dreadful seasons and finishing only a few points out of the Stanley Cup playoffs. In 1980 and 1981, for instance, they were in playoff contention until the last day of the season. The one bright spot during these years of futility was that many of McNab's draft picks (e.g. Rick Green, Ryan Walter, Mike Gartner, Bengt Gustafsson, Gaetan Duchesne and Bobby Carpenter) would impact the team for years to come, whether as important members of the roster or crucial pieces to major trades. By the summer of 1982, there was serious talk of the team moving out of the U.S. capital, and a "Save the Caps" campaign was underway. Then two significant events took place to solve the problem. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Washington Capitals」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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