The Washington Capitals made two moves to their roster on Thursday morning. They have recalled goaltender Craig Anderson from the taxi squad to make room for Connor McMichael, adding the young prospect to the taxi squad and ensuring we will see him get NHL action soon.
McMichael skated with the main group at Thursday’s practice in Arlington that had four players missing due to NHL COVID-19 protocol violations. Anderson is the third goaltender added to complement Ilya Samsonov and Vitek Vanecek.
Samsonov is one of the players who couldn’t skate due to the COVID violations as were Alex Ovechkin, Dmitry Orlov and Evgeny Kuznetsov. The lines looked vastly different but don’t expect the team to throw McMichael into the fire, at least not quite yet.
McMichael arrived in Washington following the World Juniors and had to quarantine. Now that he’s out of it he’s placed on the taxi squad where we all predicted he would wind up at the beginning of the season when the taxi squad concept was introduced.
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Anderson will backup Vanecek with Samsonov out. McMichael, the team’s 2019 first round pick, had four goals and eight points in seven games while serving as an alternate captain for Team Canada. He had a breakout season last year scoring 47 goals and 102 points in 52 games with the London Knights of the OHL. McMichael was also in the bubble in Toronto as a black ace.
Tarik El-Bashir of The Athletic tweeted out a video of McMichael skating with the NHL group from practice today. It’s officially McMichael szn!
McMichael, Fehervary, Pinho are skating with the NHL group. Anderson is also out there, too, obviously. #Caps pic.twitter.com/lUQtiNUpNl
— Tarik El-Bashir (@Tarik_ElBashir) January 21, 2021
Here is the list of the updated taxi squad: McMichael, Daniel Carr, Brian Pinho, Martin Fehervary, Pheonix Copley, and Zach Fucale.
Back just before the season began I did three bold predictions. In one of my predictions, I said that we will see Connor McMichael make his NHL debut. I even gave a month for the big date coming in February. Hopefully, that debut will come soon and give us another reason to tune in.