April 22 2008 – Washington Capitals lose game seven to the Philadelphia Flyers, kicking off a three year streak of being eliminated in game sevens
February 27 2009- Washington Redskins sign Albert Haynesworth to the biggest contract for a defensive player in NFL history
April 15 2009 – Washington Wizards finish with a season record of 19-63
January 7 2010 – Gilbert Arenas is suspended indefinitely by the NBA after joking about bringing guns into the Wizards locker room
October 19 2011 – Redskins bench Rex Grossman in favor of John Beck, making him the 21st quarterback to start for the Redskins in 19 seasons (this total will reach 24 starting quarterbacks by 2014)
May 12 2012 – Redskins give up their first-round picks in 2012, 2013, and 2014, as well as their second round pick in 2012, to move up and select Robert Griffin III
October 12 2012 – Washington Nationals give up four runs in the 9th inning to lose decisive game five to the St. Louis Cardinals
January 6 2013 – Griffin is injured in a playoff loss to the Seattle Seahawks
May 7 2015 – John Wall breaks his hand in a playoff series against the Atlanta Hawks
May 10 2016- Capitals season ends with a second round loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins after winning 56 regular season games and the Presidents’ trophy
July 17 2016- The Nationals lose an 18 inning playoff game to the San Francisco Giants 2-1, and eventually lose the series
The above is a brief calendar of DC sports this millennium. A snapshot, if you will, into the heartbreak that has become all too familiar for DC sports fans ever since the Redskins last title in 1992. A cynic might consider it a series of isolated incidents, all explainable by some other non-mystic phenomenon. But the devout sports fan sees a progression. Sudden twists of fate are common and the sports gods are cruel, but eventually the keen observer starts to observe a trend, a pattern, or dare I say it, a curse.
The Curse of the Capitol has just started to reach a tipping point. Year after year, promising seasons disintegrate into playoff letdowns. Talented players become massive disappointments. The cautious optimism that “maybe this is finally our year” will be allowed to build and build until it all inevitably comes crashing down with a leadoff homerun in the 18th inning of a playoff game. The Curse of the Capitol gives fans hope and then snatches it away. The mind-numbing-heart-stopping disbelief that Caps fans feel after yet another game 7 loss isn’t just unlucky. The heartache that comes after another 9th inning blown save or the agony after another injury that came at exactly the wrong time isn’t just a chance occurrence, it’s destiny. The Curse of the Capitol is real, and the pain is just now starting to become more acute.
The Curse manifests itself in different ways. For the Redskins, the Curse didn’t really even look like a curse at the beginning. They ranged from having some flat-out dreadful teams to some mildly competitive ones since their last title, a stretch during which they’ve been plagued by poor quarterbacking, ineffective coaching, deplorable front office decision making, and the PR debacle that is their nickname. They’ve made the playoffs six times in those 24 seasons, three times advancing out of the wild card round but never any further.
And while it wasn’t fun, it’s not altogether too bad. In a league with 32 teams there have to be some lean years; 24 years without a title is perhaps only fair, especially considering the Skins do already have three Super bowl championships to their name. Loyal fans remained loyal, and the occasional 9-7 seasons sprinkled in between the really bad years was enough to satiate the diehards thirst for winning. And in 2012, right on schedule after 20 mediocre seasons, hope and glory returned to the Redskins in the spectacle that was Robert Griffin III’s rookie season.
Rookie year RG3 was the single greatest thing to happen for the Redskins this century. After ripping off seven straight wins to close out the 2012 regular season campaign, the Redskins were perhaps the hottest team in football entering the playoffs. And things were still looking pretty good when they jumped out to a 14-0 lead in their wild-card game against the Seahawks, until RG3 clearly injured an already tender knee and team physicians and coaches let him keep playing. A debilitated RG3 limped through another three quarters before finally leaving the game down 21-14, and the Redskins lost the game.
Without the mobility that had once made RG3 so dangerous, he regressed for several seasons, struggling through injury, wild bouts of inaccuracy, terrible decision making, and proved to be a locker room headache. He was eventually benched and demoted to third-string quarterback, then signed by the woeful Cleveland Browns. After the Redskins’ marriage with RG3 flamed out so spectacularly and they realized they had to rebuild on the ashes, the loss of those three first round picks they spent to get him started to sting a bit more harshly. They’ve rebuilt themselves rather well and show all the signs of a functional franchise at the moment, but the Curse has certainly made its mark.
That same curse acted similarly on the Wizards. They’ve been fairly bad since 1992, with only seven playoff appearances in that span. In recent history the curse made it so that peak Gilbert Arenas years dovetailed perfectly with “how the hell is Lebron James so good” years, an unfortunate bit of timing that meant three solid Wizards teams were sent packing in the first round of the playoffs in back to back to back seasons from 2006-2008 by the Cavaliers. Then the aptly named Curse of the Capitol beguiled Arenas into taking his second amendment rights a little too seriously, effectively sending the franchise back to the Eastern Conference cellar for the next few seasons.
Enter John Wall, the Wizards next point guard savior and potential curse-breaker. The Wizards best chance in the Wall era came two seasons ago, when after winning 46 regular season games for the first time since 1978, the Wiz swept the Raptors in the first round of the playoffs, then stole a road game from the Hawks in the second. They weren’t championship contenders, but their chances to at least make the Eastern Conference finals looked really good. That is, until Wall broke his hand and the Wizards fell in six games, only failing to force a game seven when Paul Pierce’s buzzer beating three pointer was waved off after a video review determined the shot left his hand a fraction of a fraction of a second after the buzzer. Paul Pierce then left the Wizards, and their 2016 season was derailed by a slew of injuries which knocked the Wizards down to a 41-41 record and out of playoff contention. The Curse strikes again.
But here comes the really good stuff. The Nationals moved to DC in 2005 and had a few bad seasons but followed those up with a few remarkable strokes of luck when they turned their number one picks in 2009 and 2010 into Stephen Strasburg and Bryce Harper. In the last 5 seasons they’ve been bona fide World Series contenders, but of course have failed to win even a single playoff series.
There was the team in 2012 that won a franchise record 98 games before losing a heart wrenching five game series to the Cardinals. Then there was the team in 2013 that fell apart and failed to make the playoffs. Then in 2014 the Nats had another phenomenal regular season, racking up 96 wins and the best record in the National League before suffering yet another first round heartbreak to the eventual World Series champion Giants.
In 2015 the Nats acquired ace Max Scherzer and were widely selected by baseball experts as World Series favorites. Bryce Harper famously asked before the season even began: “where’s my ring.” Bryce didn’t realize he was cursed. The doomed Nationals were of course a crushing disappointment. Bryce Harper won MVP and Scherzer pitched two no hitters, but the Nationals failed to even make the playoffs. The 2016 season is shaping up to be another one of their awesome regular season campaigns (on pace for 95 wins), but fans have to be braced for another postseason letdown. Fingers crossed.
Still not convinced the Curse is real? I bring you the Capitals, a team that has come so tantalizingly close to Stanley Cup glory for the past decade that you have to start wondering if Alex Ovechkin is a descendent of Job. The Caps have been so good since the curse began in 1992 that it’s a miracle they don’t just relocate in search of greener (uncursed) pastures. They have failed to make the playoffs only seven times in that span, and made the Stanley cup in 1998 (where they were swept by the Red Wings). Caps fans know the curse better than any other DC sports team because of how heart stabbingly close they’ve come to breaking it.
Three straight years they lost a deciding game seven in the playoffs from 2008-2010. Since then they’ve suffered three more game seven losses, all to the New York Rangers. In 2009, a then franchise record 50 win season was cut short by a deflating 6-2 loss to the Penguins. The year after that a new franchise record 54 win season collapsed in the glove of Jaroslav Halak, when the first seeded Caps blew a 3-1 series lead and lost the series despite outshooting the 8 seed Canadians by nearly 100 shots over the seven games.
Most recently, after a franchise record (is this starting to sound familiar) 56 wins in 2016, the Capitals were almost universal Stanley Cup favorites before losing a second round series to the Penguins. Every single loss in that series was by only one goal. The most painful was of course the series clincher, a game where the Caps staged a miraculous comeback from a 3-0 deficit to force overtime, only to concede yet another game-deciding overtime goal. The Penguins proceeded to roll over the Lightning and Sharks to win the Stanley Cup, while another record-breaking season for the Caps ended in dejection at the hands of the Curse.
The Redskins have become so adept at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by now that in some games it seems almost impossible that they’re trying to win (see game vs Rams on September 17 2012). The Wizards are stuck in just about the worst place to be, trapped in the netherworld somewhere between genuinely good and bad enough to begin rebuilding. They’re no longer the young and promising team primed to take center stage once transcendent talents (Lebron, Steph Curry) begin to fade – that’d be the Celtics. Nor are they at a point where they can plausibly tank in an effort to snatch up the next transcendent talent. Instead they are stuck, mired in mediocrity for the foreseeable future.
The Capitals and Nationals have been doomed to again and again surpass expectations in the regular season, only to see the hype fizzle out in an almost historic streak of postseason letdowns. Between four sports and 24 seasons in the nation’s capital, all we have to show is one Stanley Cup loss. None of the four teams have advanced to their conference finals in the last 18 years.
It’s unclear what triggered the curse. I’ve racked historical records for a clue, but can’t find anything from DC in 1992 that would have merited this kind of punishment. There’s been nothing as historic as the Curse of the Bambino nor as high profile and social media as the Based God curse, which means it’s unclear what exactly DC can do to fix the problem. Conceivably the curse has something to do with a Clinton running for president, as Bill won the election in ’92 when the curse began and Hillary might be running now to end it. But while politics are inextricably linked to the city of DC, they shouldn’t necessarily have implications for its sports teams, whose fans for the most part are worlds removed from the intricacies of national government.
Perhaps when Cleveland finally won its championship (they were inarguably cursed from 1964-2016) it boded well for cursed teams everywhere .We can only hope. Sometimes these curses have no rhyme or reason to them. All that DC fans can do is pray for a brighter tomorrow (and maybe sacrifice a lamb or two to the sports gods) in the hopes that we don’t become the next Cleveland.