Washington Capitals Five Areas For Improvement

The Washington Capitals had a dominant 2015-2016 season, a historically dominant season.

They won 56 games and finished with 120 points, arguably the best regular season in franchise history. Therefore everything that is about to follow is nitpicking. And really, there is only one improvement that truly matters in the end: going deeper in the postseason.

That said, as good as the Caps were during the regular season there are ways they could actually get better. Let’s start with areas where it might not be fair of us to expect improvement:

1. Special Teams. The Caps rocked a 21.9% PP and a 85.2% PK, for a special teams index of 107.1, 2^nd best in the league. If the team maintains anything like this performance it will be considered a huge success.

Ability to come from behind and win close games.

Reasonable minds can disagree over whether being in close games to begin with is a problem (more on this below…), but winning them is certainly not. The Caps pulled out the win in 27 of 41 one goal games. And they were an incredible 22-16-6 when giving up the first goal.

1. Goaltending. Braden Holtby was an elite goaltender last year by most standards. He won the Vezina Trophy. He was borderline impeccable during the postseason. It doesn’t get much better than that. While there is some evidence to suggest that at times the team carried him as much as the other way around, he is only human and his .942 sv% in the playoffs helped make up for any bumps in the road. And now…

Five areas where the Washington Capitals can look to improve:

1. Five-on-five play. Special teams are important, but five-on-five hockey is the format that eats up most of the clock. Corsica has the Capitals at 51.0% Corsi-for at 5v5 last season, a middling 14^th in the league (10^th when score adjusted). The Caps were also middle of the pack in limiting Corsi-against per 60 (15^th). “Improving the Corsi” will probably not be a stated team objective in-and-of itself, but it would hopefully be a byproduct of any systems tweaks that the Caps choose to make.

Being in close games

. The Caps found themselves in 41 one-goal games (27-6-8) and 55 games within two-goals (38-9-8). They also spent the 5

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most time in the league tied with their opponent. Call it killer instinct, call it not letting your foot of the gas, call it whatever you want – it’s not ideal. This may seem trivial (

of course

the Caps want to dominate teams more often), but a common sign of potential regression is winning a lot of one-goal “coin flip” games, and the Caps did just that.

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Finding a bottom-6 forward who can score.

Last year the Caps got 87 5v5 goals from their top-6 most utilized forwards, and 50 from the remaining seven. That might not seem so bad, until you consider that the depth scoring dried up come playoffs (think Sahara desert…). And it’s still a concern going forward. Of those 50 5v5 goals, 26 were contributed by returning players Johansson, Wilson, Winnik and Beagle (32 if you swap Burakovsy for Johansson). The Caps added a solid 3C in Lars Eller, and Winnik and Brett Connolly should be upgrades over Latta and Richards. However, while all are steady presences none are offensively flashy, and it’s not clear who might serve as the primary shooting threat. Johansson is the only 20-goal getter, but he is a notoriously low volume shooter (10

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among Caps forwards). If the Caps are dominant again it might pay dividends to spend time experimenting with spreading their scoring threats out.

1. Utilizing their young players. For at least one more season the Washington Capitals have a glut of ice-time-eating veterans. However it was Andre Burakovsky who was 2^nd on the team in 5v5 goals last season with 16, and Tom Wilson who was re-signed to a hefty 2-year $4 million deal. Despite Burakovsky’s solid production, he was only 7^th in ice time, and 9^th in the playoffs. Wilson was stalled out with even less. While Wilson’s development is not priority number one, maximizing cheap young talent is key both this year and next. On defense, the yet-unsigned Dmitry Orlov saw the 6^th most ice time. And in net it was largely the same story, with a paltry 16 starts for Grubauer despite posting a reliable .918 sv%. There are promising signs though. Brian MacLellan stated that he’d like to see Orlov get more ice time than Orpik, and Kuznetsov’s ascent shows they can trust rising stars. Either by spreading out ice time or experimenting with different roles (see #3 above) it would be nice to see at least Burakovsky and Orlov inch a little bit closer to center stage.

1. Those pesky slow starts. Not much is left on this dead horse for us to beat, but there is no denying that slow starts were a problem last year. Our own Bobby Oler wrote about it here, so we will keep this short. You can go in circles forever on the “how” and “why,” but the bottom line is that a top team cannot expect to thrive when so frequently digging themselves holes to climb out of.