We just finished basking in the glow of our successes in the past year. Ahhhh… Yes, that was nice.

But now it’s over, and we must look ourselves in the mirror to see the billion things we have screwed up over the past year. We’ve got a huge collection of embarrassments and goof-ups that should have shamed us out of blogging altogether. But we’re shameless. You already knew that.

Worst of Russian Machine, 2011

(in no particular order)

The whole oil painting fracas

hu·bris (noun): Excessive pride or self-confidence.

The Washington Capitals play excellent hockey in the first round of the playoffs. As we readied ourselves for the Tampa Bay Lightning, we happened upon Alex Reut’s “We are the Champions” painting on eBay. Illustrating the Capitals as medieval warriors receiving the Stanley Cup, it is a magnificent work of art, but tragically mistimed. We wrote about it, raised a big media stink, and then the Caps lost four in a row and started working their tans. To be fair, Reut is a really nice guy and has auctioned his artwork for the Lokomotiv charity.

The Matt Cooke video timeline

Ian worked his fingers to the bone researching and compiling this litany of sins committed by Pittsburgh’s resident imp. It’s a great piece of writing, and it was a valuable resource for our Puck Daddy eulogy for the Pens, but it was stridently calling out an opponent. That hasn’t worked out for us lately. Matt Cooke has only 12 PIMs on the season (28 fewer than Alex Semin) and he’s on par for the best season of his career. I guess we’re glad he’s not hurting anyone, but somehow this is worse.

Again, the gray thing at the top of the page

I’m sure at one point we had an idea for what the hulking gray mammoth should do. Whatever it was, it’s now gone. The gray thing is a chore, something you gotta get through before you get to the good stuff. For one of the better looking blogs on the ‘sphere, the gray thing is our discoid lupus erythematosus scar. Just like Seal!

“Somebody Else” in our tagline

Semyon Varlamov abandoned us so that he might lose even more spectacularly in Colorado. That left us with a very temporary hole in the Washington goalie position and a much more lasting hole on our site’s tagline. You might say, “Just put Dmitry Orlov up there.” We will eventually, but we’re waiting for a certain something to happen first. And maybe next year we’ll have a Kuznetsov in there as well. And an outside chance at a Yakupov.

The “Winning” t-shirt

The Caps probably should have known better than to hitch their wagon to Charlie Sheen’s star. The drug addict who once shot his fiancée got fired from his job, began a chemically soaked social media tour, and somehow ended up as role model for the Caps’ season, which really wasn’t that winning-y after all. The team should’ve known better than to make this shirt, and we should’ve known better than to cover it. But Hot Shots was awesome.

Calling out Caps fans bad habits

Peter had good intentions when he put together this discussion of Verizon Center cheers. Wanting to see Caps fans exude spirit without an ironical burn or the taint of misogyny– there’s nothing wrong with that, right? Apparently there is, ’cause commenters came outta nowhere to call him out as the preening lib he obviously is. And although no one in the thread seemed to have a working understanding of what “politically correct” really means or the faintest awareness of the privileged perch from which they spoke, at least it was nice that they cared enough to write.

Trolling Jaromir Jagr

We hate Jagr (okay, Fedor doesn’t). For the first Flyers game, FOTB Max Duchaine made a “Moves like Jagr” video featuring that awesome Ovechkin hit. When Jagr came back to Verizon Center, we made posters, we scrawled some Czech hatespeech, and we re-skinned the entire site out of anger. The Flyers whipped the Caps’ asses, and we had to eat crow. Pride, fall, meekly revert the skin.

Alex Ovechkin’s candy bar and the Bauer deal

Like we said in the highlights post, Ovi does so much weird stuff that he’s easy to write about. But the cool stuff is when Ovechkin does something meaningless– like wear sweatpants over jeans or where a black Chewbacca costume. When Alex signs a super-lucrative endorsement deal with Bauer, does epic commercials for Reebok, or gets his face on the wrapper of a candy bar that touts how awesome he is, it casts into stark relief how un-awesome his hockey playing has been lately. Le sigh. And then there’s the “Will he hit 50 goals?” thing that Neil wrote, which is a question no one asks anymore.

Kuznetsov- and Orlov-mania

Our blog has the word “Russian” in the title, so we’re contractually obligated to write about the Caps rising stars from the land of wodka. But the sheer quantity of Russian prospect posts we serve you is absurd: “hitting is good”, Kuznetrick, 3-point night in Hershey, “I’ve made a decision”, swagger, Mark French likey, fighting vs. playing, Rosetta Stone, playoffs, AHL is hard, World Juniors, shootout goals, Maradona, Karjala Cup, gettin’ fancy, leading the KHL, Ovechkin-esque glass diving, shoot shoot shoot, wedding photos, and like a gazillion more.

Shacking up with the Puck Buddys

Our biggest offseason acquisition was a group of dudes called the Puck Buddys. They manage a terrific blog written by gay hockey fans and players. And best of all, they’re rabid Caps fans. Craig and Doug now contribute various stories to the site, but for a while they caught hell for their pregame posts. Some commenters expressed their venomous dislike for those pregamers, which really contain the same mix of hockey smarts, silly jokes, and character assassination that you can find in any RMNB post. The Puck Buddys are now members of the Russian Machine family; they’re the gay uncles whose wacky hijinx make everything exciting.

We’ve done so many more awful things, but there’s just not space. We’d love to tell you about the S-bomb we dropped on Twitter, the people who have justifiably blocked us on Twitter, or Neil’s endless parade of goalie posts. But nope; ran outta time. Aw shucks. Guess it’s back to thinking we’re awesome for you.

For all our missteps, the future is bright. We’ve got a big year ahead of us. We’re gonna do different kinds of media– tv and radio and stuff. Maybe the Caps will be in the 2013 Winter Classic and we can pick the bones off that again. There will certainly be a chase for the playoffs and hopefully a postseason run.

And of course we’ll make a huge deal about Alex Ovechkin’s next milestone. His 20th goal should come in March and dear god what has happened to this team make it stop make it stop

Grab a chair, pour a ginger ale, and put some soft jazz on the hifi. We’re about to take a leisurely ride through the world of RMNB 2011. Today we’ll be looking at the good stuff today, and the really awful stuff we’ll see on Friday.

In 2011 we published more than 470 articles that more than doubled (206%) our traffic from 2010. Our readers (i.e. you) stay longer on our site, view more articles (102.5%), leave more comments (119%), and correct our grammar more than ever before. We climbed above 5k followers on Twitter (mostly spam bots), and we are now flirting with 6k. We’ve got around 3600 people liking us on Facebook, most of whom are just trying to win the swag Ian gives away every game. We started a tumblelog, where almost 500 people follow our silly pictures and quotes and other stuff that doesn’t fit on the main site. We’re working on a pinterest page, as soon as we figure out what that is.

We started the Pick ‘Em Contest on Facebook, where someone always predicts an Ovechtrick. We’ve begun grassroots poster campaigns for Dale Hunter, Jaromir Jagr, and Jay Beagle. We sold a bunch t-shirts and then blew all the profit on giveaways and contests. We supported the increasingly fantastic art of Rachel Cohen and wistfully saw stat-meister Neil Greenberg sail off to brighter horizons. We raised more than $2,500 for charity. We learned the difference between “re-sign” and “resign.” We threw two parties at Front Page VA, where much merriment was had. We experimented with video and audio content, and got our game recaps posted right after the buzzer with only a small ton of factual errors and typos.

It’s been a very good year for the Russian Machine. We’re now the go-to place for the search terms “hello neuvy”, “alexander semin unibrow”, “holtbyisms”, and — unfathomably–  ”justin timberlake mickey mouse club.” We wouldn’t have it any other way.

Best of Russian Machine, 2011

(in no particular order)

The Ovechtrick

We did not invent the fictional 9-goal game (that was the NHL  promoting their Verizon GameCenter app), but we certainly covered the living hell out of it. There’s the original commercial, behind the scenes with CRL, one actor’s diary, the t-shirt, and our most-read article of the year– Neil Greenberg’s “Could an Ovechtrick Really Happen?”

Bruce Boudreau’s Exit

When Bench Boss Bruce Boudreau’s team went three-games down on Tampa Bay Lightning, we could smell the blood in the water. Our “Fire Bruce  Boudreau” article from back in April was a spit in the face of the growing mob. As this season fell apart, we ruminated on Boudreau’s bad rap. When the firing became an inevitability after the Buffalo disaster, we commissioned Max Duchaine to create a goodbye video, set to the tune of Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You.”

USA Warriors versus Congressional Scum

One of the Puck Buddys’ first contributions to the Machine was this series on the hockey game between the wounded warriors and the congressional team. We got a moving story from side of the Warriors (“Hockey was a life-saver for me”), the maniacal evil laughter of Chicago’s Rep. Quigley, and a somber recap of the game. It’s hard not to finish reading those stories without admiration for the (non-Congress-y) people involved and newfound perspective of our own gifts.

The Adventures of Ovi

Alex Ovechkin’s non-hockey-related hijinx are a bottomless font of web content. The mindless glee and mischief that Ovi takes with him wherever goes brightens up even the most dour offseason. This year we had the mystifyingly popular Russians-playing-soccer-with-their-shirts-off post, pictures of Ovi wearing what appears to be a suit and hat weaved out of pubic hair, and a the whole thing about wearing sweat pants OVER blue jeans. The entire summer was cataloged exhaustively in this timeline, assembled by Ian Oland.

The Capitals Guardian

The whole NHL Guardian project was idiotic, patronizing, and poorly executed. We knew from the start that Stan Lee’s invented superhero for our team would suck big time. So we made our own. Rachel Cohen (pencils) and Ian Oland (colors) did the art, and Peter did the plot. He’s an old guy with a Constitution cape and Washington Monument sword with the power to control traffic. Pure win.

Ovi Dances

Compared to the team’s current troubles, the spring of 2011 seems kind of quaint. But recall if you will a team that had lost its spark, and the effort it exerted to rekindle it. When Alex Ovechkin beat Buffalo and won the Eastern Conference first seed with an overtime goal, he danced like the exuberant dweeb we all know he is. Rachel captured it in her adorable artwork, and we’ve got gifs.

Sasha Cares

Ah, yes. No “Best Of” list is complete without Washington’s mercurial man of mystery Alex Semin. RMNB came together to craft the definitive document on Alex Semin, featuring the creation of Neil’s invented stat, The Sasha Index. When Matt Bradley questioned Semin’s commitment, we made up a bar graph of the things Semin actually does care about . Then Rachel designed a t-shirt and sewed the darn thing into existence.

Kanooblian

During our “Winter is Coming” campaign (spoiler: it’s the next bullet), we premiered an illustration by Mark Burrier that Knuble’s Knights promptly purloined via eBay. When Knuble fell to the fourth line and had ice time taken away, we put the righteous indignation hat on. Kvetching about Mike’s unfair treatment has become a game recap tradition, but so has going ape-nuts over his in-your-face goals.

Winter is Coming

Peter went overboard about Game of Thrones this year. It invaded his writing to the amusement of no one, and he demanded that House Stark’s words “Winter is Coming” become our rally cry heading into the season. So Ian created this photoshop wonder, and we each wrote our psyche-up pieces for the season. Chris wrote about the 2009 playoffs ’cause he’s a noob, Peter also wrote about the 2009 playoffs ’cause he’s creepily fixated on Matt Bradley, Rachel wrote about the Winter Classic ’cause she’s a superfan, and Ian wrote about Ovechkin’s first playoff goal ’cause he knows good SEO. Finally, Max capped it off with a superb pump-up video.

William Shannon’s Wish

Chris Gordon’s profile on 5-year-old William Shannon becoming a Capitals player for a day was–  by far– the best thing we published this year. Thanks to the Make-a-Wish Foundation, William got to suit up, skate with the team, school Varlamov on the shootout, ride in a limo, ride the zamboni, hang with the media, and a bunch of other stuff I wish I could do. William’s father Devin Shannon gave us additional scoop first-hand along with a bunch of pictures that melt the heart of even the most cynical fan.

There’s a lot more, but it doesn’t fit into a nice list. Check out our primer for the new season, Chris’ story on Caps fans getting psyched up in the preseason, the emergence of #AvsFailWatch, our eulogy for the Pittsburgh Penguins on Puck Daddy, Joe Beninati’s suits, our coverage of the “We are Louder” thing, and Holtby Night in Canada. Or, if you prefer, just browse around the /best-of/ tag for whatever. We’ll keep it updated as soon as we write something good.

2011 Scrapbook

Here’s a smattering of images to document the year. The photoshops are Ian’s, the original art is Rachel’s, the photos are Chris’s.

Our Shepard Fairey-styled Knuble protest poster.

The Caps are soft.

The disaster in Buffalo.

Steckelbombing Carrie Underwood.

Winter is Coming.

Crosby plays golf.

The Jagr protest poster. More on this tomorrow.

Hello Neuvy.

The Matt Bradley valentine!

Sheepvechkin Halloween.

Chris’ photo of Ovechkin getting pie’d on his birthday.

Chris’ photo of my girlfriend, Alex Morgan.

That wraps up our victory lap. And now you know what’s coming. Tomorrow will be the Worst of RMNB, and it will be very long. Carbo-load tonight.

Merry Christmas from Terry Dobbins, Mike Green and the 7 Raccoons That Perished to Make That Hat

Merry Christmas Eve from everyone here at Russian Machine Never Breaks! As our writers disperse across the state to spend time with their respective families, we wanted to thank you for welcoming us into the Capitals Diaspora with open arms and giving us a chance to entertain you for the last two weeks.

To give back, tomorrow on Christmas Day, we wanted to release to you some true stories and artwork that warmed our cold, Russian hearts and made us believe that the Christmas spirit of giving is still alive and well.

While we are away chugging alcoholic eggnog, dropping our mitts and fighting our in-laws, we wanted you to get on Twitter and let the Russian Machine know, what’s the best thing about Caps Fans? ie: @russianmachine The Best Thing About #Caps Fans is… [your answer]

We’ll post some of the best answers tomorrow! Take care and have a Merry Christmas!