Capitals Development Camp 2011, Day 1 - The Fun Begins

Philipp Grubauer springs into action... to skate to the bench where BB is speaking.

The 2011 edition of the annual Washington Capitals development camp started much as one would expect. Starting slightly before 9:45 AM, Group A (featuring, most notably, Dmitry Kugryshev, Cody Eakin, and goalies Philipp Grubauer from Germany and Steffen Soberg from Norway, both 4th round picks in 2010 and 2011 respectively) was already on ice participating in some standard practice drills. Following the end of the first practice session, there was media availability....

We can't thank the Caps PR department enough for the press access. 

George McPhee spoke for a little. GMGM talks pretty quitely, so at times it was difficult to hear him (we got stuck behind the video cameras and mainstream reporters). He did mention liking Eakin, though that seems to have been pretty clear for a while, I think. Olie Kolzig was also there, sporting a Capitals development camp t-shirt...

Olie Kolzig and the Caps... finally together again.

Brouwer, Eakin, and Boudreau also spoke (though we were out to lunch during parts of these). Boudreau in his talk basically said straight out that Tomas Vokoun is likely the starting goalie for next season, though that should not come as a surprise to anybody - Vokoun is easily among the top 10, if not top 5 goalies in the NHL today.

Defensemen!

Group B took the ice around 2 PM, featuring Stanislav Galiev and Dmitry Orlov, as well as recent undrafted UFA signing Mattias Sjogren. Dmitry Orlov proved he has a little mean streak in him, most notably with a huge hit on forward Garrett Ross which elicited gasps from the sparse crowd at Kettler. Orlov looked to be very impressive on ice, but frankly we didn’t end up paying too much attention to how the players played on the ice - we were mostly overcome with sheer excitement throughout the day. We'll try to have some analysis of how the players look on ice when we go to some practices and scrimmages later in the week!

Danick Paquette, welcome to DC.

At the end of the day, we were exhausted, as I'm sure the prospects were as well. Here are some more photos from today....

Check out the rest of the photos here.....