Even before losing Nate Schmidt in the expansion draft, this was going to be an interesting offseason for the Washington Capitals. Their top two right wings are hitting unrestricted free agency and seemingly every young, foundational piece is a restricted free agent. Caps general manger Brian Maclellan figures to be busy over the summer.
Let’s take a look at where the Caps stand now and begin to figure out where they should go from here.
I used Cap Friendly’s Armchair GM feature to get a handle on the Caps’ salary cap situation right now. I then used Matt Cane’s salary projections for free agents to get cap hit values for the Caps important restricted free agents.
A couple quick disclaimers:
- The lines are not what I expect the Caps to open the season with. This is meant more as an overview of the roster with salaries, not an actual depth chart.
- I don’t necessarily expect the young players listed (Riley Barber and the like) to make the team, but players with a similar salary likely will.
Yikes, this is a little ugly, especially on defense. However, this roster has $6.3 million in cap space, so this team is salvageable.
A few thoughts:
- I think Matt’s projected cap hits may be a little on the low side because the Caps are likely to pursue longer term deals with Evgeny Kuznetsov and Dmitry Orlov. The cap room may be more around $5.25-5.5 million.
- There’s no way this roster should pursue TJ Oshie. Matt projects Oshie to get around $5.8 million, which would leave the Caps with about $500,000 left to address the defense.
- I think the two biggest needs for this team are a middle-six winger to shore up the depth there and a left-handed defender to play on the second pairing with John Carlson. A guy like Justin Williams would fit in nicely, both in salary and need, in a middle-six forward role. On the defensive side, we’ll have a post early next week that explores some of the options there.
- One potential savings of a little over $1 million would be to deal Philipp Grubauer and have Phoenix Copley back-up Braden Holtby. But there’s not much of a market for goalies right now so the return on that deal would likely be minimal.
We’ll have posts about specific players the Caps could target coming soon, but this is what the current team looks like.
Want to give this a shot yourself? Head over to Cap Friendly and use their Armchair GM feature. Post your roster in the comments.
