#1 Staying out of the box
The Washington Capitals need to stop taking penalties if they want to win more games. The Caps rank fifth in the league with 699 penalty minutes including an average of 10:07 penalty minutes per game.
The Caps have drawn 277 penalties while taking 298. Tom Wilson leads the team with 93 penalty minutes. I know what you’re thinking, oh shocker there’s Tom Wilson leading in penalty minutes. But if you actually look closer you’ll see that his 93 penalty minutes are a career-low. He’s playing a much more disciplined game. Now it’s up to the rest of the team to follow suit.
Garnet Hathaway is second on the team with 79 penalty minutes. Lars Eller has 48 while Jonas Siegenthaler has 43. Evgeny Kuznetsov and Radko Gudas each have 40 penalty minutes. Dmitry Orlov and Richard Panik each have 36 penalty minutes.
Alex Ovechkin has 30 penalty minutes while Nic Dowd has 28. John Carlson has 26 while Michal Kempny has 22. Brenden Dillon already has 21 through 10 games played. Jakub Vrana has 18 penalty minutes while Carl Hagelin has 16, Nicklas Backstrom has 14, while Brendan Leipsic and Nick Jensen have 13. Ilya Kovalchuk has four while Travis Boyd has two.
The Caps need to play a more disciplined game and stay out of the box if they want to improve their play.