Why Did The Washington Capitals Trade Jakub Vrana

The Washington Capitals surprisingly made possibly the biggest splash on deadline day of 2021. They acquired a young talented forward Anthony Mantha from the Detroit Red Wings. Unfortunately for Capitals fans Jakub Vrana was the key piece going to other direction. Washington also shipped off Richard Panik and a couple of draft picks including a first round pick in this upcoming draft.

You have to pay to get. The Capitals definitely paid for Mantha.

With no disrespect meant towards Richard Panik, the reason this trade hurts Caps fans is the loss of Vrana. The 25-year-old Czech winger had become a bit of a fan favorite in D.C. and for pretty good reason.

He seemed like a very likable person. If you have a likable guy on your team more times than not stats become less important. Not necessarily irrelevant, but less important as you tend to “bond with” or form a connection with that player, even though we as fans don’t really ever get to know the guy. If you’re a likable person you will tend to get some kind of pass if your stats aren’t great.

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On top of being likable, Vrana also had the stats. Still only being 25 he also had the promise. Vrana is a slam dunk 25 goal scorer a year, at least on a team like the Capitals. In 2018-19 he scored 24 goals in 82 games and he followed that up by scoring 25 goals in just 69 games before the 2019-20 season got cut short.

Vrana is a guy who is knocking on the door of potentially scoring 30 goals a year. I don’t think I am the only one who thinks sometime down the road 40 goals might be in his future. I had the thought not long ago that Vrana would be the centerpiece of this team (in terms of goal scoring) whenever Alex Ovechkin decided to leave or retire. He really does have that much potential.

So why are the Capitals trading a guy like this?

Just recently, there was a giant red flag that was waving over Vrana. He was a healthy scratch for not one game, but two straight games. Both of those games being against the Devils earlier this month.

A healthy scratch is a big enough warning. When head coach Peter Laviolette comes out and says that they have had too many talks about compete level and the fact that you never saw that level rise that was the giant red flag. Even worse, after returning from his healthy scratches you still did not see the effort level go up. More times than not, he was next to invisible.

Now me, as a clueless fan watching from nearly three thousand miles away from Washington I could see the trouble brewing. I doubt I was alone. I was still surprised to see it happen, but when you take a step back, look at all the players in the deal (or at least the main two players of the deal) and the likely things that need to happen in the near future this deal makes sense for the Caps.

First off, someone is going to have to pay Vrana this coming off-season. The Capitals are already having cap issues, and if other teams see the potential like a lot of us do then he will get a nice pay raise from his current $3.35m cap hit. This may be more of a wash, since Mantha already has a cap hit of $5.7m, we’ll see if Vrana makes more next season. Mantha however is signed for three more seasons, while Vrana is a RFA this off-season.

What will also be a wait and see is if Mantha is a better player for this Capitals team going forward. Washington is in the highly luxurious situation of not needing goal scoring. Even without Vrana this team is capable of scoring five goals a night vs almost any team. The games that they may need offense in are against teams that Vrana’s game seemingly doesn’t do well in, notably teams like the Islanders, the hard fought, scrappy kind of games. The kinds of games that require high competitiveness that apparently, according to Laviolette, Vrana does not have.

Also, if we’re talking about offense, it isn’t like Mantha is a slouch in that department either. His career high in goals is nearly identical to Vrana’s, his career high is 25 with 67 games played in 2018-19. The season before that he also scored 24 goals. Last season in 43 games he scored 16 goals and he has 11 goals in 42 games this season. Vrana has 11 goals in 39 games this season.

Something interesting I saw was some individual numbers these guys posted. Mantha has 68 individual scoring chances for while Vrana had 56. Vrana also had 13 individual high danger attempts so far this season to Mantha’s 24. All of this contributing to Mantha having a 5.3 individual expected goals for to Vrana’s 4.44.

It will also be interesting to see how Mantha’s numbers look on a talented team like the Capitals compared to Vrana’s numbers on a much less talented Red Wings team. This may be something we revisit down the road and I’m sure fans will be keeping an eye on it themselves.

Parting with a guy and player like Jakub Vrana is never going to be easy. He’s likable, he is very talented and he will forever be a part of the Washington Capitals thanks to a small event that happened in 2018.

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With that being said, if you are going to part with a player like Vrana I think the Capitals did just about as well as you could.

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