No NHL team has fewer points in 2023 than the Washington Capitals. After Tuesday's moves, Adam Proteau says the Caps should keep gathering assets for next year.
The Washington Capitals have been two different teams this season.
For part of the year, they were a team that reeled off two five-game win streaks and had a record of 20-13-4 as of December 27.
More often than not, the Caps have been an absolute mess. They began the season 7-10-3, and after their relative hot streak in late December, they’ve gone 8-14-1 in the new year, and they’re just 4-10-0 in their past 14 games. They are dead last in points in 2023.
It should surprise no one, then, that Washington is slipping farther and farther out of the playoff picture. With only 64 standings points, the Capitals are 13 points behind the New York Rangers for third place in the Metropolitan Division. They’re also just eight points ahead of the seventh-place Philadelphia Flyers.
Small wonder, then, that Caps GM Brian MacLellan has begun selling off pieces of the roster to the highest bidder. Like the Nashville Predators in the Western Conference, Washington is being forced to make some painful choices before the NHL’s March 3 trade deadline, and that process began with the Feb. 23 deal that sent veteran defenseman Dmitry Orlov and forward Garnet Hathaway to the Boston Bruins.
But that process is not over. It’s not even close. The Caps’ dismal performance is forcing MacLellan to trade away as many pending UFAs as he can. And boy oh boy, does he have a lot of UFAs – as of early Tuesday morning, they had 10 UFAs in total, and that’s not including the two injured veterans currently on the long-term injured reserve.
Five of the Capitals’s pending UFAs were on the blueline as Tuesday began, including Nick Jensen, Trevor van Riemsdyk, Matt Irwin and Erik Gustafsson. But that changed when MacLellan made a major move for the future Tuesday afternoon, dealing Gustafsson and a first-round draft pick (originally belonging to Boston) to Toronto in exchange for 22-year-old blueliner Rasmus Sandin.
At the same time, MacLellan moved forward Marcus Johansson to Minnesota for a third-rounder in 2024. That leaves veterans Lars Eller, Craig Smith (acquired from Boston in the Orlov/Hathaway transaction), Conor Sheary and Nicolas Aube-Kubel as Washington’s remaining pending UFA forwards.
On Tuesday evening, Washington also re-signed Jensen to a three-year contract extension worth $4.05 million annually.
Any way you frame it, it will likely be a momentous off-season for Washington’s lineup, and MacLellan clearly knew he couldn’t allow all this talent to depart via free agency for nothing in return.
Fortunately, the aforementioned players all have some value to bona fide playoff teams. Also, none of those players have no-movement/no-trade clauses in their current contracts. MacLellan can move any of them anytime before the trade deadline. But it will require pain and a lame-duck rest of the season for the Capitals to do the right thing and build for the future.
That’s something Washington fans have not been accustomed to in the Alexander Ovechkin era, but it’s a clear reality now.
The last thing Caps fans should want is for the team to slightly surge upward in the final weeks of this regular season and finish 10th or 11th in the Eastern Conference. That’s not going to help them reverse course next year. They need to suffer now in order to produce better results as soon as possible.
It has to be deflating for the Capitals to be in this position, but every NHL team eventually has a reckoning with Father Time and the slow erosion of their talent base.
The trick for teams is to take a cold-blooded, honest look at where they are in their competitive cycle and act accordingly. Otherwise, teams fool themselves into thinking they’re closer to a resurgence than they actually are. Washington can’t allow misguided optimism to seep in and prevent them from rebuilding the right way.
The truth is, the Capitals aren’t proficient on offense – they’re 20th in the league with 3.02 goals-for per game. They also don't have stellar defensive group – their 2.98 goals-against average is tied for 13th-best in the NHL.
They are a flawed team at the moment, and no quick fix will change that. The arrival of Sandin gives them a long-term, affordable option on the back end, but there will be more young players to come for the Caps.
There are numerous “seller” teams heading toward deadline day, but the Capitals should be at or near the top of the list of those teams. The glory days, the Stanley Cup championship days, seem like an eternity away now. And it will feel even longer if Washington doesn’t grit its collective teeth and continue pushing through this uncomfortable stage.
The choice is clear, and the answers are as well. It’s time the Caps made major changes. The alternative is a far worse choice for them.