What Would A Good Season Look Like For The Washington Capitals?

How the Washington Capitals can have a good season.

It is a brand new year and here we are talking about a new hockey season. This new year will get off to a great start for hockey and Washington Capitals fans, the new season starts on January 13th and the Caps will drop the puck on their season on the 14th in Buffalo.

It is a shortened season however. A shortened season is better than no season, obviously. But in shortened seasons I tend to feel expectations should be thrown out of the window. Seasons with less than 82 games can be a little chaotic and that will probably be even more so this time around. The NHL will look different in a couple of ways. One, the division alignment is different and two teams will be seeing a lot of the same opponents and in quick succession.

For example, the Capitals play the Sabres in Buffalo on back to back nights to start the season. They then play the Penguins in Pittsburgh twice before they go home to once again play the Sabres twice. There is your first six games of the season.

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A lot of places will still have limited or no fans in attendance as well. This could be a very strange season indeed. So excuse me, I find making predictions weird because we have no idea how teams or players will react to this kind of situation and this kind of season.

I also think a lot of fans aren’t sure what a good season could look like. A lot of fans have good seasons ingrained in our brains. In football a twelve win season is great. If you win sixty games in an NBA season you’re one of the great teams that season. In hockey it’s the 100 points target. If you got over 100 points you had a very good season and anything higher than that the greater your season was.

So what’s the equivalent? In a 56 game season what should Capitals fans be looking at in terms of point totals at the end of the season. We’re obviously not looking at 100+ points. If that’s the case the Capitals are going nearly undefeated. Sorry for my skepticism, but I doubt the Capitals do that.

If we’re going to talk about expectations I would expect this Capitals teams to at least be on par with last season. As I said earlier, throw expectations to the side, but this Capitals team on paper is at the least the same as last season, and in my opinion a little better.

Last season when the season was stopped the Caps had 90 points in 69 games. The equals out to getting 1.30 points or so a game. If the team had played a full 82 game season they would have gotten about 106 points at season’s end.

Something I like to do is aim low when talking about predictions or expectations. Even though on paper I think this coming season’s team looks better than last seasons team lets keep aiming low. I think 106 points is a good target and anything above that would be a tremendous season.

So if we give the Capitals 1.30 points per game this season, in a 56 game season a good season would see them getting about 72 or 73 points.

If we want to go back to some recent history and talk about shortened season (not counting stopped season like last season) we can go back to the 2013 lockout season. The Chicago Blackhawks won the Presidents’ Trophy with 77 points in 48 games. That was a great team who also ended up winning the Stanley Cup that season. The Pittsburgh Penguins topped the eastern conference with 72 points that year, the Capitals had 57 points.

I’ve said it a bunch already here, but expectations are weird for these kinds of seasons and situations. It’s hard to predict anything in a regular season. This is not a regular season. This is a good Capitals team. If you want to know what a good season will look like it looks like 72+ points will be the target.

Anything too much less than that and it’s a fairly average season and anything much higher than that and this Capitals team is a great team.

Hockey is back people! It will be great to once again see these great athletes do what they do best.