Washington Capitals: Defense is the top priority to address in offseason

The Washington Capitals need to address their defense in the offseason.

The Washington Capitals enter another early and long offseason. One thing they’ll have to address is their defense in both free agency and internally. There’s a lot of changes coming. Oh yeah, and they also need a new coach.

The Caps will also need a defensive coach as well after Reid Cashman found an opportunity with Dartmouth. There’s a possibility that Brooks Orpik could fill that role but we’ll see. We also have free agency where we’ll look to upgrade the blue line.

The Caps will have two unrestricted free agents and a restricted free agent this offseason. The UFAs are Radko Gudas and Brenden Dillon. The one RFA that will probably be back next season is Jonas Siegenthaler, who carries a cap hit of $714,166. Gudas has a cap hit of $2,345,000 while Dillons is $1,635,000.

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There are several names out there on the market that the Caps could pursue if they’re unable to re-sign Dillon or Gudas. One name that is popular is Chris Tanev. We talked about that more here.

There are other names as well like Trevor Van Riemsdyk, Dylan Demelo, Dustin Byfuglien, Alex Pietrangelo, Justin Schultz, Tyson Barrie, Torey Krug, Andy Greene, and Sami Vatanen among others the Caps could look at on the market.

Out of the two defensemen who are UFAs the Caps should try to re-sign Dillon. They need a defenseman who’s proven, that should be at the top of their shopping list.

The Capitals were ranked 17th in the NHL in goals allowed allowing 212 in the regular season. In the playoffs the Caps were ranked 13th allowing 23 goals. Defense wins championships and the defense was a big weakness in the postseason as the Caps were unable to play 60 minute games. Those resulted in two round robin losses and a five game bow out to the New York Islanders.

We hope that the next coach is also defensive minded. Ironically, Todd Reirden worked with the defense before given the reigns of head coach so you would think the defense wouldn’t have any issues during the two seasons he coached. However, the defense was a weakness and here we are needing to address it.

Free agency, whenever that may be, will be an interesting time to address this position or perhaps the Caps might make a trade or two in the coming weeks. Whatever happens, we’ll be right on top of it.