Three Players That The Capitals Need To Perform Well In The Playoffs
The Washington Capitals will need these guys to step up.
Come playoff time you need your best players to be your best players. To win Stanley Cups your top players need to perform well when the lights shine brightest. The Washington Capitals have been pretty fortunate in that their best players, namely Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom, have both shown up and played great in the playoffs.
Looking at stat lines alone, Backstrom has maybe two playoff seasons where he didn’t produce like the team needed. He had two points in nine games in 2011 and three points in seven games in 2013. Ovechkin on the other hand had just one bad stat line in the playoffs. That also came in 2013 when he had just one goal and two points in the seven games.
Washington doesn’t need to worry about these two superstars. Regardless of what the national media has said over the years, these two, for the most part, have always gotten the job done. It’s the team as a whole that failed.
Now who else on the team needs to pull their weight to make this team great? There’s no need to get clever or tricky here. The players on this list will be pretty obvious. With that being said, well start with…
Braden Holtby
How many times has a bad goaltending performance killed a playoff run? Probably way more times than most of us can count. Luckily for the Capitals, they have not had to worry about that very often at all with Holtby between the pipes.
Holtby’s career playoff numbers are 48 wins and 41 losses. His goals against average is a very good 2.09 and his save percentage is at .928%. Some very, very good numbers from Mr. Holtby.
Holtby is similar Ovechkin and Backstrom. He’s a key player who the team does not have to worry about come spring (or whenever this years playoff starts) time. The only time I can honestly remember him struggling was during the 2017 playoffs vs the Penguins. I just remember him not being at the top of his game during that series in particular. Last year vs the Hurricanes he was good, but he got out played by Petr Mrazek.
Those two “down” years, he posted a 2.47 GAA and a 2.67. Other than those two years, his highest GAA was 2.22 in 2013. He’s had three playoffs with an average of under two goals a game. Pretty good!
Goaltending can make or break playoff runs. Holtby is a pretty steady hand back there and if the Caps want to make another deep run they will need him to be great once more. The backup goalie this time around is also a rookie in Ilya Samsonov. It’s not to say a rookie goaltender can’t guide a team to the Cup. It’s happened before, and Samsonov has shown he has the capabilities to be a great goaltender in the future. Still, it’s not ideal to stick a rookie in the net at the most important time of the year.
If every team had a list like this, I’m fairly certain the goaltender will show up on said list. This ones no different. The Capitals need Holtby to be at the top of his game to win their second Stanley Cup.
John Carlson
If I was writing this before the season started I doubt I put Carlson on this list. However, based on the way his season has gone I feel like he needs to be a part of our list.
To start the season Carlson was on fire. For the first two months of the season Carlson was a no doubt Norris Trophy winner. Some were even calling for him to be in the Hart Trophy discussions as league MVP. After that, he was pretty iffy. Iffy enough that if I had a vote for the Norris I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have voted for him.
If Carlson can recapture what he was doing in the early portions of the season this will be an incredibly hard team to beat in the playoffs. Think of a lot of the recent Stanley Cup winners. Crosby, and Malkin had Kris Letang. Kane and Toews had Duncan Keith. Kopitar and Carter had Drew Doughty.
If you have that two way threat on the back end it is just an incredible luxury. Not to mention we saw Carlson himself drag the team to some wins early in the 2019-20 season.
On the flip side, if he and the Capitals defense plays like they did for large parts of the season, mostly the second half of the season, I’m not sure I can see this team going too far.
This really has been “the season of Carlson”. We’ve seen how good and how dangerous this team can be when he is firing on all cylinders. We’ve also seen how average this team can be when Carlson is, average or worse than that.
Average won’t get the job done. If the Caps want to go on a long run in the playoffs they’ll need Carlson at the top of his game.
Evgeny Kuznetsov
To me, this could be the most important player on the Capitals. We’ve already said it plenty of times. We don’t have to worry about Ovechkin and Backstrom and Holtby. They have proven time and time again, they show up when it matters. Kuznetsov, really, has not proven that.
The one year he showed up all playoffs long guess what happened? The Capitals won the Stanley Cup. That year, he could have, maybe even should have won the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP. It came down to him and countryman and captain Alex Ovechkin. Ovechkin won the playoff MVP with 15 goals and 27 points in 24 games while Kuznetsov had 12 goals and 32 points in the 24 games. His 32 points led the playoffs that year.
The years before he took his playoff game to another level he had 7 points in 14 games in 2015, 2 points in 12 games in 2016, and 10 points in 13 games in 2017. Then he exploded in 2018 and Washington went all the way.
If Kuznetsov is going good he opens up Backstrom and eases the pressure on Backstrom and Ovechkin. With the teams top two centers going at the same time it also opens up Lars Eller and his third line to take over. If your teams top three centers are all performing well it creates match-up nightmares. Not to mention the Capitals fourth line has been very good all season making things even worse for the Caps opposition.
The problem with Kuznetsov is he tends to take himself out of the game. He was one of the many that was invisible during last years short playoff run that ended in the first round. He did have 6 points in the seven games, but just one goal. He also has 52 points in 63 games so far this season. Some pretty good numbers. They’re below what he’s capable of though, and he has been very up and down, and quite frankly, mostly down this entire season.
He has all the skill in the world, the will just isn’t always there. He’s even said it himself how “it’s not his style” to be an MVP in this league because you have to work hard and play hard all year. That’s not that uncommon honestly. It’s just more infuriating when you see a player as talented as number 92.
More. Washington Capitals: Training camp is finally on the horizon. light
As long as the Capitals have the center depth they have right now they will be Cup contenders. But you can’t have one of those centers take themselves out of games as often as Kuznetsov does. Teams get a lot easier to defend that way. If he can recreate what he did in 2018 I guess I’d just have one thing to say to teams that have to play Washington in the postseason. Watch. Out!