Washington Capitals: 3 Reasons Why This Team Cannot Win The Stanley Cup
With every passing day and every sleep we get closer and closer to the NHL season and Washington Capitals hockey. As of writing this we are 34 days away from the first game of the season for the Caps. Good news for you, you will be reading this at a later date. The first game is even closer now.
We just got done explaining why we think this Capitals team can win the Stanley Cup. If you didn’t read that, you can check that out here.
Bottom line this is a good hockey team. They are going to win a lot of hockey games during the season and for the majority of the season, if not the entire season, they will be considered major threats to win the Stanley Cup.
But this is the NHL. Every team has holes, every team has some weaknesses. Rarely do you get a situation like the Tampa Bay Lightning of the last couple of season where you look at the team and you cannot find a weakness. We do not have that this season, and that means the Washington Capitals have some holes and weaknesses.
There are plenty of reasons to believe in this Caps team, but there are areas of concern. What are those reasons, and why can’t this Capitals team win the Stanley Cup?
Effort
This is something I’ve been harping on for several seasons now. Ever since the Capitals won the Stanley Cup in 2018 the effort has been so-so. When you have a great team and the talent like Washington has that kind of effort will win a lot of games during the regular season.
Then come playoff time, oy!
It’s been two or three very poor efforts at the most important time of the year for this franchise. The Capitals were better than the Hurricanes in 2019 and when they gave the effort they looked good. Unfortunately, they didn’t give the effort nearly enough and they lost in seven games. Then nearly nobody showed up in the 2020 bubble and they get eliminated in five games vs the New York Islanders.
This past season I give the team a little bit of a pass. It was a weird season, a short season, and a ton of guys were banged up at the absolute worst possible time. Still, there were large chunks of time vs Boston where the team just got out hustled which just cannot happen come playoff time.
I’ve asked this ridiculous question earlier. Is this Capitals team happy winning just one Stanley Cup? We all know the answer to that question. Of course they aren’t. But if that is the case, why have they played so poorly in the playoffs. Why is the one thing that should be a guarantee, effort, a question with these guys?
Until this team can prove that they can give a good effort every night it has to be considered a weakness and a worry. Other teams know if they play hard and play fast they can beat this Capitals team. The Caps have to match that effort or they won’t get close to the Cup.
Goaltending
I don’t think you can sit here and definitively say that goaltending is a weakness for the Washington Capitals. It’s not a weakness, it’s more of an unproven. We could easily come back here in eight to nine months and talk about how great the young tandem of Samsonov and Vanecek played, and that they carried this team.
However, up to this point, they haven’t. Until they prove that they can be relied upon it has to be a question.
Samsonov is no doubt the biggest question in net, mostly because most assume he is the Capitals future at this position. He has shown he has the talent to be a number one in this league. He hasn’t exactly proven to be reliable though.
In the 2020 bubble, he was unavailable due to an ATV incident he sustained while the league was paused. He then followed that up by going on the COVID list twice during the 2021 season. The best ability is availability. You can’t say Samsonov has had that early on in his career.
Vanecek is the backup on this team, however if Samsonov is not available can he get the job done? He had a heck of a season in his debut year going 21-10-4 in 37 games played. He posted a 2.69 GAA and a .908 save percentage. Good numbers, not great, but Vanecek definitely had a great season considering he was thrown into the deep end.
If Samsonov continues to be unreliable is Vancek good enough to take this team to the Stanley Cup? Can Samsonov be a reliable NHL starter?
The Capitals have two young, promising and already good NHL goalies. But neither have proved they can be “the guy” on a contending NHL team. Until they do it has to be a question going into the season.
Team Defense
One thing that can make life easy on young goaltenders is solid team defense. The Capitals are not a bad defensive team. When you look at the stats this is actually a top ten, even top five defense. Washington was a top five team in scoring chances against, and top ten in high danger attempts against.
But stats are just stats aren’t they? You can use them to a point, but sometimes they can tell some fibs.
When you watch this Capitals team, they don’t usually look like a top defensive team. Again, I don’t think they look awful on defense. But, too many times during the season, when you look at the goaltending, you realize, or think that whoever the goalie was that night they had to do too much work or make too many tough saves. Or on a bad night didn’t make enough of those tough saves leading to a loss.
Too many times last season did we look at Vitek Vanecek and think “Wow he had a great night!”. It’s great to think that about your young goalie, but the team needs to make sure we’re not saying that as often as we do.
On top of that, I think there are question about the defensemen as well. John Carlson is a great defenseman, but when people say that, they’re mostly talking about his point production and his ability to generate offense. On D, he’s very inconsistent. He can make great plays and play good defense, but he can also get caught too many times.
Orlov is the best defensive guy on the team, probably by far. Schultz was OK last season. Jensen was better last season, but again, a lot of his improvements came on offense, he’s still iffy on D. After that there are questions on who is on this team and. van Riemsdyk? Kempny? Fehervary? Alexeyev? There is room for two of those guys, so who makes the team?
Whoever makes it from those players, how much of a difference will they make? When you face the top teams in the eastern conference which pair of players will shutdown the top line of the other team? Who’s trying to shut down Marchand from Boston? What about Kucherov in Tampa? How about Crosby or Malkin in the division?
More. Washington Capitals: Top 10 best scorers of all-time. light
I don’t see a whole lot of shutdown options for this team. It will really have to be a team effort, and last season, even letting up as little as they did, it still seemed they let up far too much.