(Ed. Note: It’s the NHL Alternate History project! We’ve asked fans and bloggers from 31 teams to pick one turning point in their franchise’s history and ask ‘what if things had gone differently?’ Trades, hirings, firings, wins, losses, injuries … all of it. How would one different outcome change the course of history for an NHL team? Today: Jason Rogers of Japers’ Rink on the Washington Capitals. Enjoy!)

By Jason Rogers

Early on, before primordial Man first learned to rub two concussion videos together to create Monetization, water froze into ice.

To quote Douglas Adams, “this has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

In the summer of 1974, some of this frozen water eventually made its way to Washington, D.C. by way of NHL expansion. That first Washington Capitals season is still the all-time low-water mark for bumbling futility in NHL history, amassing just eight total wins and somehow managing to cripple public confidence in Washington institutions more in that decade than the literal resignation of the President and the onset of disco.

But when imagining a pivotal Capitals moment to take a cosmic do-over on, there’s no point in reinventing the wheel, or the draft lottery. Forget “what if”-ing your way back through the 2004 NHL Draft, when the bubbling ping pong gods leapt the Capitals over the worse-ranked (gasp) Chicago Blackhawks and Pittsburgh Penguins to bequeath them goofy aestheticism’s very avatar himself, Alexander Ovechkin.

Forget the 2001 blockbuster trade that brought a be-mulleted Jaromir Jagr to Washington from Pittsburgh and that, like Blockbuster Video itself, resulted in little more than a short-term rental and eventual financial ruin.

Those are obvious choices, and nothing in D.C. sports is obvious. Not winning, not blowing leads, not trading away Marcus Johansson to the New Jersey Devils for a bag of promotional Mountain Dew hockey pucks and a heap of rotting, unused cap space. No, we need to go deeper.

And by deeper, I inexplicably mean more recent.

What if the Capitals Never Hired Dale Hunter and Adam Oates as Head Coach?

Look, if you love the Capitals, or get a particularly potent brand of sadist’s schadenfreude from watching them suffer, you know all about the first round of the 2009-2010 Stanley Cup Eastern Conference playoffs. You may even have the word “HALAK” tattooed across your stomach in Gothic script like Tupac.

Fresh off the first Presidents’ Trophy in franchise history and another 50-goal season from Alex Ovechkin, the Capitals met the eighth-seeded Montreal Canadiens and back-up wunderkind goaltender Jaroslav Halak in the first round of the playoffs. In the following seven games, Halak would stand on his head so long he should be diagnosed with chronic traumatic encephalopathy, including saving 53-of-54 shots for a simply Martian .981 save percentage in a Game 6 victory. Washington fell to the Canadiens in seven games, and the book on the Capitals was written forever in blood.

Regular season champs, playoff chumps.

Rinse, repeat, recycle, ad infinitum.

The coaching hot seat, then, was already set to “bun warmer” by the time the 2010-2011 Stanley Cup playoffs rolled around the following year. The Capitals had just wrapped up their fourth consecutive Southeastern Division title (ironic t-shirts for sale here!), and essentially steamrolled their way through the New York Rangers in the first round, knocking off the Blueshirts in just five games. In the second round, the Capitals drew the Tampa Bay Lightning, a plucky young upstart club from the Florida panhandle making their first postseason appearance in four years. In an effort to slow down the high-flying Capitals offense, Tampa employed a neutral zone trap. If you’re unfamiliar, the neutral zone trap is a defensive tactic designed to squeeze the life out of an offensive team as it attempts to gain the offensive zone. As a curious side-effect, the trap also squeezes the life out of the fun of hockey, the patience of neutral observers, and the Capitals’ ability to win a single game.

The Lightning swept Washington in four games, and it was another early summer of head-scratching for the boys in Red.

Now, here’s what really happened next: Bruce Boudreau’s reputation as a “great coach who can’t get over the hump” was firmly cemented in the ether of hockey canon, and just one month into the 2011-2012 season, he was unceremoniously [poop]-canned for Capitals legend and then-coach of the OHL’s London Knights, Dale Hunter.