ARLINGTON, VA — The Washington Capitals are no strangers to power play problems. Since the departures of Nicklas Backstrom, TJ Oshie, and Evgeny Kuznetsov, the Caps have struggled to find success on the man advantage, at points going on month-long droughts between goals. Since the 2022-23 season, they’ve succeeded on 20.1 percent of their power play opportunities, ranking 21st in the NHL over that span.
This season, however, arguably marks a low point in recent memory. The Capitals currently sit second-last in the league in 2025-26 with a 15.5 power play percentage (beating only the Colorado Avalanche, whose 39-10-9 record makes the power play less of a concern), and are on track for the franchise’s worst PP% since 2005-06. Alex Ovechkin, who holds the all-time power-play goals record (330) by nearly a 30-goal margin, has had just four tallies up a man this year. The team has not converted in 10 opportunities since returning from the Olympic break. And Washington has allowed eight shorthanded goals against, tied for third-most in the NHL.
While the Caps know their power play needs to improve, head coach Spencer Carbery believes a complete overhaul this late in the season would do more harm than good.
“I think two things are really, really important,” he said. “One is that, at this point in the season, if we just completely (start over), now all of a sudden in the most significant games of the year, you could be trying something that you haven’t used all year long, which is, it’s tough.
“Now, the counter to that would be like, well, why not? Because what’s going on right now isn’t working. And that would lead me to the second point, though, is it’s not about what’s going on in the past. It’s not about our percentage. It’s not about how it looked. We need to approach the power play with a one-game mindset.”
With the Capitals in such a tight race for a playoff spot, the power play may well decide their fate in both individual contests and on the season. Carbery hopes that focusing on a single game at a time can help prevent mounting frustrations from making the slump worse.
“If you go two for four, tonight, that could lead us to victory,” he said. “And so the short-term memory like a goldfish, however you want to explain it, of just getting our power play group to have a mindset of, ‘It is a clean slate tonight. We’re going to be the best power play in the league. We’re going to be completely on the same page with every little detail with it. I don’t care what happened in Montreal. I don’t care what’s happened in the last 60 games. I don’t care what our percentage is. It’s a clean slate tonight.’ So trying to get us as mentally strong as possible with, just worry about tonight. If we go two-for-four tonight, it could be the difference in our season.”
Carbery, whose work running the Toronto Maple Leafs’ power play from 2021 to 2023 helped bolster his candidacy for the Capitals’ head coaching job, expressed full confidence in assistant coach Kirk Muller, though he noted that the entire coaching staff contributed to the team’s power play.
“We’re all involved in [the power play],” Carbery said. “I’m not going to break down the specifics of who handles each and every responsibility. Kirk runs our power play, does a great job. It’s not a lack of effort, and not a lack of him trying to turn over every rock and find solutions to what’s going on. And so we all contribute and we all help where we see fit. We all try to problem solve it as a staff.”
Asked if any one element of the power play stood out, Carbery pointed to the Capital’s entries, an area they’ve struggled with throughout his tenure in DC.
“Entries, for me, are and have been an issue for a long time with our group,” he said. “And there’s partly a reason for that, hands, and there’s stuff that goes into it. But yeah, we’ve got to do a better job entering the zone. Because if you can enter and gain possession — that’s not always, when I say enter, you may think, carry the puck across the blue line, turn up, McDavid, wow. No, sometimes it’s putting a puck to space and going to get it and retrieving it.
“But if you can constantly and consistently get set up, I don’t care where you’re in zone formation and what you’re doing, because you’re eventually going to get opportunities. And if you don’t (get) that one, you’re still going to get set up, set up, set up, set up. And I think that gives power plays a tremendous amount of confidence. When you know that you can get set up nine times out of ten, it’s a huge help. I just feel like that’s, over the last three years, it’s been an issue.”
A high-end skilled winger, the sort of player general manager Chris Patrick has expressed interest in acquiring, could certainly bolster the power play, but the trade market has been relatively quiet, and the Capitals’ middling playoff chances make it harder (though not impossible) to justify buying before Friday’s trade deadline.
As of Monday afternoon, the Capitals sit two points behind the Boston Bruins for the second wild card spot in the East, with three more games played. They’ll need every advantage they can manage to push up into the playoff picture in their final 20 games of the season, and the power play may be one of the biggest barriers to that goal.
