The Washington Capitals head into the 2024-25 campaign looking to improve on an inconsistent season where they squeaked into the postseason during their last game of the year and were swept by the New York Rangers in the first round of the playoffs. To take the next step, Washington aggressively retooled the team over the offseason, making seven major additions to the club’s NHL roster through trade or free agency.
The job of integrating those new players falls to second-year head coach Spencer Carbery. Carbery pinpointed the two primary things he believes his Capitals team will need to focus on to be successful in a recent chat with NHL.com’s Tom Gulitti.
“Whatever the outside world has us pegged at percentage-wise of making the playoffs – and I’m not shy to say we don’t have many believers again this year – it’s important that we know two things,” Carbery said. “One is we are not going to catch anybody off guard. Teams are going to know, ‘Okay, this is a team that caught some teams maybe off guard last year. They were a playoff team. We need to be ready to go tonight.’
“Two is we need to get better in a bunch of areas, especially offensively.”
Washington didn’t start well under the rookie bench boss last year as they struggled to adapt to Carbery’s new strategies, including a fast-paced offensive system and man-to-man defense. Combined with faltering goaltending from Darcy Kuemper, the team struggled to create offense and light the lamp.
Alex Ovechkin, in his age-38 season, scored just eight goals through his first 43 games and needed a red-hot final stretch where he scored at a 0.64 goals-per-game rate to hit the 30-goal plateau. But the team’s problems ran much deeper than their captain’s mortalness.
The team finished with the worst goal differential, minus 37, of any team to qualify for the playoffs in the salary cap era. The Capitals finished just 28th in the league in goals per game (2.63) and ranked 29th in the league with 143 five-on-five goals. Dylan Strome (16) is the lone player from last year’s club to rank in the top 100 leaguewide in five-on-five goals. Only Strome, Alex Ovechkin (14), Connor McMichael (13), Sonny Milano (12), and Nic Dowd (11) were among the top 200.
The team also had massive struggles with their, at times, predictable power play during the year, including a month-long stretch without scoring. During the playoffs, Washington converted just twice on 17 power-play opportunities and gave up two shorthanded goals to the Rangers.
The team also didn’t get much scoring from its backend. Capitals defensemen ranked 31st in the NHL with 20 total goals scored ahead of only the Chicago Blackhawks (19). John Carlson was the lone defender on the team to amass more than 25 points.
Carbery will hope that the players added over the summer will be more likely to adapt to his original ideas for his team. Principal among those names being Pierre-Luc Dubois who has produced multiple 60-point seasons in the NHL, Andrew Mangiapane who has a 35-goal season under his belt, and Jakob Chychrun who scored 14 goals from the blueline last year.
“[The front office] did a phenomenal job,” Carbery said in July. “All we want as coaches is to have a clear plan and direction with where we’re going and ultimately trying to do everything they can to improve the roster. And I feel like that’s exactly what they did. So I think they’ve been working their butts off trying to find creative ways to improve our roster while we’re trying to get younger, while we’re trying to retool this thing.
“You’ve got to get creative with some stuff and that’s what, for me, they’ve done a superb job of. So now it’s on us as coaches to make sure that we’re getting everybody on the same page. We’re real clear with how we want to play and what our identity looks like from day one. And that’s what we’ll get to work on.”
Carbery will get his first crack at toying with his new roster when the Capitals open Training Camp on September 19. The team’s first preseason game is set for September 22 against the Philadelphia Flyers.
