As the Washington Capitals slide further down the standings, head coach Spencer Carbery is trying to change the team’s identity as it heads into the stretch run of the season.
The Capitals, who suffered their fourth-straight loss on Wednesday, now sit 12th in the Eastern Conference standings, four points out of the final playoff spot. What’s more dire is that each team ahead of them in the standings has a game or two in hand, and the Capitals rank 14th out of 16 Eastern Conference teams in points percentage.
“At the end of the day, we’re just making too many big mistakes,” Carbery said to the media. “I mean, I sound like a broken record, but that’s just the reality of it. We’re making massive, massive mistakes. And it’s throughout, you know, you just can’t in this league, it’s just too competitive. You just cannot give free goals. And that’s what we’re doing too much.”
The Capitals’ latest loss was arguably their worst of the season as they fell to the Vancouver Canucks, 4-3. The Canucks, who traded away Quinn Hughes, their captain and best player, last month, had lost 11 straight games heading into the matchup and had won just 4 home games at Rogers Arena all season.
“I think there’s a lot of things going on that we’re just making too many blunders that we can’t cover up for,” Carbery said. “We’re just going to have to tighten up. Like, I think what we’re going back to is, this is not the team from last year. It’s just not. And so if we keep thinking that we are and keep banging our heads against the wall and coming up short and go, ‘Why aren’t we the team from last year? What’s going on? What happened?’ Instead of realizing, ‘Listen, we might have to go back to a team two years ago that just checked and just didn’t give teams anything.'”
Carbery is referring to the 2023-24 season, his first as head coach of the Capitals. After missing the playoffs the year before under Peter Laviolette, the Capitals struggled early as they installed new systems. The team however ultimately squeaked into the playoffs during the final game of the season after tightening things up as a group and playing a heavy checking game where they pounced on other teams’ mistakes. Notably, the Capitals set the salary-cap era record that season as the team with the worst goal differential, -37, to ever make the playoffs.
“It was totally comfortable in a 1-0 game and (we) felt good about that and wanted to do that,” Carbery said. “And so, you know, that’s what we’re working with our group on, is there’s nothing wrong with winning a game 2-1 and giving up 10 chances and it being a little bit ugly and a little bit of a fight in the mud.”
The 2024-25 Capitals, by contrast, scored the second-most goals in the league (288), second only to the Atlantic Division-winning Tampa Bay Lightning (294), and had a goal differential of plus-54. Alex Ovechkin broke the NHL goals record on April 6 and scored a team-leading 44 goals. The Capitals had seven different players who scored 20-or-more goals including Tom Wilson (33), Aliaksei Protas (30), Dylan Strome (29), Connor McMichael (26), Jakob Chychrun (20), and Pierre-Luc Dubois (20).
Carbery’s comments about making games more ugly come after sharing his opinion that he thought the team’s offense was missing high-end offensive talent that can produce points night in, night out in mid-December.
“Scoring goals and our forward group, and an ability to create offense and finish, is always going to be our Achilles heel,” Carbery said then. “It’s just how we’re built. And with a 40-year-old Alex Ovechkin and, you know, go down the list of our forward group, it’s just always going to be something that we’re going to have to continue to work on.
“You’re going to have points in the season where it’s going really well, like it was for 10, 12 games there. And then you’re going to have points where it dries up a little bit, and guys are not finishing at a high rate because we don’t have those really, really high, high-end difference makers in our forward group that can do some of those things. So we’ve got to do it by committee.”
The Capitals have been without Pierre-Luc Dubois for much of the season due to core surgery and have lost other players such as Tom Wilson, Aliaksei Protas, and Justin Sourdif for swaths of time due to more minor injuries. Capitals GM Chris Patrick recently stated that the team is in the market for a “higher-end, skilled winger”, and the team recently was linked to having interest for New York Rangers star winger, Artemi Panarin. The NHL trade deadline is March 6.
While the Capitals could get a shot in the arm from a trade, they will have to figure things out themselves and soon. There are only 31 games left in the season, and how the team rebounds during their current six-game road trip could ultimately decide whether they reach the postseason.
“If there’s ever a time where our urgency level, I mean, you look at our season is hanging in the balance here,” Carbery said. “Like, that’s just a fact. I’m not sugarcoating and I’m not trying to overemphasize where we’re at the Eastern Conference and what’s coming at the deadline and all the break and how quick the deadline comes after the break. You name it. Everything is pointing to the fact that our season is hanging in the balance. And that’s where we’re going to have to dig in and give everything we possibly have and play like we’re in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. I hate using that in the regular season and you never want to drum that up in January and say it’s like a playoff game, but we are getting very very close to teetering on, if we don’t get results here, we’re going to be in a huge, huge hole.”
