Washington Wakes Up In The Playoff Hunt
A 3-2 stretch on a Western Canadian road trip has the team dreaming of Stanley.
When we last looked in on the Washington Capitals, it seemed as if the team was in sell mode ahead of the NHL’s March 8th Trade Deadline. When General Manager Brian MacLellan announced that center Evgeny Kuznetsov would be waived and sent to the AHL ahead of finding him a new team to play for, he said that any moves he made would be gauged with an eye to help the Capitals, which had started the season with one of the oldest rosters in the NHL, get younger.
While that might have been interpreted as wanting to import younger players, it’s clear that he also meant giving younger players on the team like centers Hendrix Lapierre and Conor McMichael a chance to prove they belong in the NHL. In the seven games since I last wrote about the team, they’ve gone 5-2, including a 3-2 stretch on a trip through Western Canada that has left Washington in sole possession of the final Wild Card playoff spot in the Eastern Conference.
I’m sure that MacLellan and head coach Spencer Carbery might say we shouldn’t be surprised. After all, staying competitive while icing a legitimate roster around Alex Ovechkin as he continued his pursuit of Wayne Gretzky in the record books was the plan all along. I had my doubts before the start of the season, fearing that Washington didn’t have enough depth in the lineup to make this happen. And if you had told me that they would manage this feat while losing two of their top three centers — Kuznetsov and Nicklas Backstrom — I would have scoffed.
Yet, here we are, and the league’s talking heads — folks like ESPN’s John Buccigross and SportNet’s Elliotte Friedman — are touting Carbery as a possible candidate for the Jack Adams Award as NHL Coach of the Year with 15 games left in the season.
A quick look at the top line stats for the team and one number sticks out like a sore thumb: the -27 goal differential. The pattern was established early in the season that the Caps would regularly be blown out of the barn by the league’s top clubs. A pair of losses on the recent road trip — 3-0 to the Winnipeg Jets and 7-2 to the Edmonton Oilers — were object lessons. Yet Carbery manages to help his team put the losses in the rear view mirror as the it grinds out tight victories in response.
It happened again on this Western road trip. After opening the trip with the losses to Winnipeg and Edmonton, the Caps edged Seattle and Vancouver on the road by identical 2-1 scores, and then finished things up with a solid 5-2 win over the Calgary Flames to close the trip. Better still, Ovechkin scored twice last night, giving him 21 goals on the season, a number that seemed all but impossible a few weeks ago.
As heartening as this recent stretch has been, the climb into that final playoff spot wouldn’t have happened if the four teams immediately below Washington in the standings — the Detroit Red Wings, New York Islanders, Buffalo Sabres and Pittsburgh Penguins — had played up to their potential. All four teams have more talent that the Capitals and have seriously underachieved. And as fun as this has been to watch, all of this hard work can come undone in a night or two when your lead is only a single point and the “puck luck” begins to turn for the team’s behind you.
The tests will only get tougher. What comes next is a brutal stretch of six games in 11 days, five of them against teams already in playoff position, and one against Detroit, a team most closely trailing Washington in the standings. Five of those games will come at home with only a quick overnight trip to Toronto to interrupt things.
We’ll check in again when this next stretch winds up on March 30 at home vs. Boston.
Before I go, I shouldn’t forget the rest of the news coming out of the trade deadline in Washington. The biggest headline was the deal that sent Kuznetsov to Carolina for a third round pick in the 2025 NHL Draft. As part of the deal, Washington retained half of Kuznetsov’s $7.8 million salary. Even getting just half of his salary off the books for next season was a major triumph for MacLellan, never mind stacking yet another pick in the 2025 draft. MacLellan also dealt defenseman Joel Edmundson to Toronto for a third round pick in 2024 and a fifth round pick in 2025. Washington will have five picks in the first three rounds of the 2024 draft (three in the third round) and six in 2025 (three in the second round).
But what might be more interesting is who stayed in DC. Winger Max Pacioretty apparently turned down a deal that would have sent him to the Metropolitan Division-leading New York Rangers. Apparently, according to Frank Seravalli, Pacioretty felt he had some unfinished business with the Capitals, and wanted to spend the rest of the season here. Another young player, winger Ivan Miroshnichenko, has worked his way into the lineup, and recently passed the ten game mark with the team. That’s the point after which a player burns the first year on their entry level contract with the team, something the Caps could easily have avoided by sending him back to the Hershey Bears of the American Hockey League. That the team didn’t is quite the vote of confidence in a young player, especially as the Caps are now fighting to secure a playoff spot.
Taken together, things will look awfully interesting going into this year’s draft in June. MacLellan will have lots of chips to make deals with, and that may include a body or two. I thought a first round pick was too high a price for checking center Nic Dowd, and the market agreed. But seeing how forward Beck Malensteyn has developed on Dowd’s wing, the 4th-line center is looking expendable. The emergence of Charlie Lindgren as the team’s top goalie has also complicated things in a good way. There was talk that Lindgren could have been moved at the deadline, but the market wasn’t offering what MacLellan needed to throw the season away. But with goalie Clay Stevenson stashed at Hershey, Lindgren could be moved for the right price.
MacLellan’s last challenge is finding a way to dispose of the last season left on Backstrom’s contract at $9.2 million. MacLellan dropped some major hints at the end of last season that Backstrom ought to retire. The fact that he didn’t meant there was no salary cap room for the team to add a top line center in free agency to make the team more competitive. One would think after Backstrom’s mid-season departure from the team that some sort of contract buyout was in the offing. Stay tuned.
One thing is for sure: it’ll be a lot more fun watching this team fight for a playoff spot rather than simply playing out the string. I’m looking forward to it.
Meanwhile, up in New York, Rangers winger Matt Rempe continues his rampage through the NHL, though this time his physicality earned him a suspension.
Rempe got a five-minute major and a game misconduct for elbowing New Jersey Devils defenseman Jonas Siegenthaler on March 11 during a 3-1 Rangers win at Madison Square Garden. The next day, George Parros, the Princeton grad and former NHL enforcer who leads the league’s Office of Player Safety tagged Rempe with a four-game suspension. That Siegenthaler is known as a skilled defenseman who plays things clean, probably didn’t help Rempe’s case with Parros. He’s lucky he didn’t get a stiffer sentence.
It was a malicious and stupid penalty to take for Rempe, who in 56 minutes of ice time has earned 54 penalty minutes this season. The Rangers are clearly a more physical team when he is on the ice, and one hopes he’ll learn from this enforced time out. We’ll see when he returns to the ice tonight when the Winnipeg Jets visit the Garden.