It's Story Time Kids!

Everybody, come up here and gather around Ol' Crazy Uncle Caps Nut, he has a cautionary tale he wants to tell you.

He wants to tell you about an NHL team that some might say has a great and grand hockey tradition. A team with a "winning" tradition. This NHL team fell on some hard times. The financial situation of the team forced them to either trade or let go of some of the players who were not only very popular with the team's "rabid" (in more ways than one) fanbase but around the NHL as well and were also directly responsible for forging the team's "winning" tradition.

As these financial hard times hit, the team slid further and further down the NHL standings. The management of the team talked at length about rebuilding not just the NHL Franchise, but the entire system from top to bottom. The team had decided to go with younger players that admittedly wouldn't command as high of a salary as the wonderful veterans that the "rabid" (in more ways than one) fanbase had come to love over the years.

And of course because the team didn't do well in the regular season, this with a great and grand "winning" hockey tradition stopped making the playoffs and were annually one of the first teams to pick in the League's Annual Entry Draft. The team used these highly selected players as the foundation so to speak for the "new" franchise.

However, one day this hockey franchise decided that they were going to ignore their financial constraints. They decided that they had enough of being one of the worst teams in the league. So when the NHL opened up Free Agency, they went out and got themselves some veterans who cost them a fair sum of salary to go with the highly selected draft picks. When the dust settled, this team had not one, not two, but three forwards on board who did not play for this team the year before. They even added a defenseman whom they wanted on their top pairing to run the Power Play.

Some of the talking heads and other pundits looked at the moves that this franchise made combining their highly selected draft picks with the free agents and declared that this grand and great franchise with the "winning" tradition was "back." There was even some talk before the season began of this team contending for the Stanley Cup in a "worst to first" kind of story.

Of course by now, if you haven't figured it out, Ol' Crazy Uncle Caps Nut wants to tell you about the Pittsburgh Penguin Scum. He wants to warn you that signing Pavel Datsyuk is not going to guarantee a playoff spot just like John LeClair, Zigmund Palffy, and Mark Recchi didn't help the Penguin Scum very much last year. He also wants to point out that getting a top pairing defenseman isn't going to ensure success either because most Caps fans like himself laughed at the contract that the Penguin Scum offered Sergei Gonchar.

Basically, what Ol' Crazy Uncle Caps Nut wants to do is to ask you fine folks who are threatening to cancel your season tickets unless "the Caps show a financial commitment" to stop and consider for a second, just how angry will you be if the team goes out and spends freely this summer and STILL fails to compete for a playoff spot next season? Because Ol' Crazy Uncle Caps Nut knows that the Penguin Scum had a grand point total improvement of zero, zip, zlich, nada, nothing from 2003-2004 to the 2005-2006 season and that the Penguin Scum actually won fewer games after the lockout than they did before it.

Free agents aren't the answer to all that ails the Caps. We've been down this road before.