Washington Capitals win the 2018 Stanley Cup

For a third consecutive year, an Eastern Conference team has won the Stanley Cup. The road that brought the Washington Capitals to this moment, to their first-ever Cup win, has been nothing short of wild. With a first-ever Cup on the line for whoever won, the Capitals or the Golden Knights, this Cup Final felt bigger than ever. That makes the lessons learned from this series all the more important for the future of the game.

Even if Washington hadn’t won in Game 5, if any other team had put up the fight they put up against Vegas, there’s no way they would be labeled chokers. The Capitals’ reputation has preceded them for far too long. Two years in a row before this one, they won the Presidents Trophy as the league’s top regular season team, and now they’ve got a Stanley Cup. That’s a lot of winning over the last three years.

The Capitals won the Stanley Cup on Thursday. It’s the first championship in their 44 seasons of existence and the first for a team from Washington since 1992.

Friday morning, President Donald Trump tweeted about them:

It’s fitting that the last Alex Ovechkin goal on this Capitals Stanley Cup run came at the end of an opportunity he created for himself. Ovechkin has had good teammates during his years with the Capitals, but he’s always been hockey’s most efficient one-man wrecking crew. He’s the guy who scores more goals than anyone else, of course. But he’s also the guy who drives play more than anyone else by shooting with unprecedented frequency. He puts defensemen on their heels and makes goaltenders pray his shots somehow hit them.

So it was in the second period against the Golden Knights on Thursday. Halfway through the frame, Ovechkin darted into the Vegas zone and forced the slow-footed Brayden McNabb to trip him to prevent a scoring chance. Twenty-three seconds later, on the power play he generated, Ovechkin set up to Marc-Andre Fleury’s right and blasted a one-timer past him, finishing a pass from Nicklas Backstrom like he had so many times before.

History has been made in these playoffs, with the expansion Vegas Golden Knights in the Stanley Cup Final, the third first-year NHL team to reach the final round. But they ran into the Washington Capitals, who beat Vegas in five games for their first championship in franchise history.

Welcome to the 2018 Stanley Cup Playoffs! The defending champion Pittsburgh Penguins are looking to three-peat, while the Las Vegas Golden Knights are making their first appearance after finishing their debut season with 47 wins.

T.J. Oshie is a Stanley Cup champion along with the rest of the Washington Capitals. The player who most of America knows for his shootout heroics at the 2014 Winter Olympics has now reached the domestic pinnacle of his sport.

Oshie’s father, Tim, who is in his 50s, has Alzheimer’s disease. His diagnosis came in 2012, and his hockey-star son has been fighting that battle alongside him ever since.

The Washington Capitals are Stanley Cup champions for the first time in what had been a tortured 44-year history. They clinched it by beating the Vegas Golden Knights in a fifth game of the league final on Thursday night, on the road, 4-3. The Capitals’ win marks the first title for one of D.C.’s major professional teams since the 1991 season’s Super Bowl.

Lars Eller scored the winning goal 12:23 into the third period of Game 5:

The Capitals haven’t sealed a Stanley Cup win yet, but star Devante Smith-Pelly has seemingly made up his made about whether he’d go to the White House and meet President Trump if they do.

Heading into Game 5 against the Vegas Golden Knights with an opportunity to take home the cup, Smith-Pelly had thoughts on the president’s governing and certain comments. He spoke about the possibility of visiting the White House in the coming months should they win the series, saying,