Tag: Washington Capitals

Braden Holtby is not on the side of Donald Trump, which surely does not make him alone in a presidency that has now all but killed the put-politics-aside-and-come-to-the-East-Room-and-smile days of champions who used to visit the White House. President Jimmy Carter put out word he would like the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pirates, both of whom had won championships in the 1979-1980 calendar year, to visit the White House to be feted for their greatness. By the time Ronald Reagan hit Ricky Sanders on a slant pattern on the White House lawn in 1987, celebrating Washington’s Super Bowl victory, the tradition of inviting championship teams to the White House was cemented, and the tradeoff felt worth it: One town's beloved athletes got to visit the halls of American history and one nation's president got to bask in the reflected glory of those champions. Manny Ramirez couldn’t make it in 2004 when the Boston Red Sox visited to celebrate their first World Series title since 1918 because his grandmother was sick. When he missed the ceremony again in 2007 after the Red Sox won, President Bush couldn't help himself. Now, we must have media gatherings to report a player's decision, and whether that affects the chemistry of the locker room, his relationships with his other teammates who did go to the White House going forward. "We stick by every single teammate that we have and their decision," Holtby said. Holtby’s support of the LGBTQ community has spanned his time in Washington. "We've just gotten to know people in around the community, and the issues they go through and what they’re trying to accomplish. It's something that we both feel is an issue that’s close to us, an issue we believe in."

Image On Tuesday, the day after the exciting first game of the Stanley Cup finals — a 6-4 victory for the plucky Las Vegas Golden Knights over the veteran Washington Capitals, led by the Russian star Alex Ovechkin — the news came from Ukraine that a Russian journalist who had fled Moscow last year after receiving death threats had been shot in the back and killed while returning home with groceries. Here she is.” Babchenko harbored no illusions about Russia’s first president, Boris Yeltsin, initiator of the first Chechen war, but under President Vladimir Putin, Babchenko’s opposition to the regime and its supporters hardened. He promised to return to Moscow eventually “in a NATO tank.” I am a hockey fan, with a particular interest in Russian hockey and its complex fate in the wake of the Soviet collapse, and I had spent the morning after the first game of the Stanley Cup finals reading up on the Washington Capitals. And then the news came that Babchenko had been killed. As officials proceeded to claim at a news conference attended by Babchenko, they had learned that a former Ukrainian fighter had been hired to assassinate Babchenko. Though announcing his death wasn’t, maybe, the best way of going about catching his would-be assassin — from now on, news of another Kremlin opponent killed is going to be treated with justified skepticism. But he is the president of Russia. And in some cases he may be ordering them, too. So where does this leave the Stanley Cup finals? Ovechkin is well within the mainstream of Russian political life, and furthermore he has to go back there eventually; most Russian hockey players return to Russia after their playing careers are over in the West.