Washington Capitals: Top Three Storylines Of The Early Season
Ten games into the new NHL season the Washington Capitals are off to a pretty good start. Overall it doesn’t sound the best. At the end of the day the team has won five games and they’ve lost five games. But the way hockey works those losses are easy to take. The Capitals are 5-1-4. They have 14 points, they’re third in the division and four points out of first place.
We’ll worry about winning the division or catching the teams above them later. As for now, the team is off to a pretty good start. If you can play the way they’re playing, they are going to win a lot of games. And, the way they’re going, if they lose they are going to get something out of it.
Just like every other year and every other team, even though it’s early, there are storylines that have already developed. Some of these storylines will fade, some will continue and some new ones will pop up over the next four, five or six months.
For now, there are a couple of things that have popped up early. Here are three things I think are some of the biggest storylines of the 2021-22 Washington Capitals season.
Stars Leading The Team
To start this season, this team is being led by the Russian stars on the first line. Evgeny Kuznetsov, and of course the captain Alex Ovechkin. Ovechkin starting the season good isn’t too shocking. Scoring 10 goals and ten games, that is pretty surprising.
There were some people out there who thought this Capitals team and the captain of this franchise had given the best they have to offer. Well, maybe not yet. Ovechkin is on pace for 82 goals this season. I’m going to guess he isn’t going to hit that mark, but at this point would you bet against Ovechkin getting another fifty goal season?
One reason it would be foolish to bet against Ovechkin is the way his center Evgeny Kuznetsov is playing. I’m not sure it’s surprising that he has started this season playing well either. Last season was easily the worst of his career and he has been coming off two or three more very inconsistent seasons. His play became so frustrating that he ended up in trade rumors nearly all offseason long.
Kuznetsov has answered that by scoring 13 points in the first ten games of the season. Points are just points though. Kuznetsov was invisible for all of last season and if that was a full season he still would have stumbled into nearly 50 points. He’s very, very talented, even seemingly giving half efforts most nights he almost put up an amount of points a lot of NHL players wish they could put up.
When talking about Kuznetsov, throw points out the window. Just watch him play. He’s flying out there. It seems like every shift he creates a chance, whether that’s for himself or for his line mates. He’s giving 100% effort nearly effort shift. Thanks to that he’s on pace for the best season of his career.
It’s no coincidence Ovechkin is off to a hot start. He’s off to a great start because his line mate and center is playing like a man on a mission. These two Russian superstars are leading this team. When they are playing like this, the sky is the limit.
Injuries Are A Problem Early
This is something I had concerns with before the season started. The Washington Capitals are an older team, and there are some older players on this team who have injury “issues” if you want to call them that.
Nicklas Backstrom came into this season with a hip injury that he sustained last season. We’re ten games into the season, he has yet to play and he has yet to practice with the team, meaning he is still a little while away from returning or making his season debut.
A hip injury is also something that scares me as something that can linger for a long, long time. There are a couple of injuries I would put in that category. Hamstring (not so much in hockey, but a nasty injury that can linger in other sports), back, groin and hip. You should probably put head or concussions in that as well.
We’ll see how Backstrom comes back, and I hope this isn’t something that continues to hamper him this season or even the rest of his career. But if it did, I wouldn’t be that shocked either.
T.J. Oshie has also joined him on the injured list. Unlike Backstrom, we don’t exactly know what his injury is. However, a few games ago he blocked a shot and it hit his foot or ankle. He’s also wearing a boot so it’s obviously one of those two.
Oshie is one of those guys who will get an injury or two throughout an 82 game season. The way he plays, the all out kind of style, get in battles on the boards, be a hard physical player, get to the hard to get to areas on the ice, dive to block shots. That kind of game will give you knocks and you’re more likely to get hurt than say a Kuznetsov who is a more perimeter player.
Now Anthony Mantha has joined the injured list with a shoulder injury. He has apparently already had surgery or will soon go under the knife and will be out indefinitely.
Nic Dowd also missed a couple of games earlier this season due to an injury. He has since returned.
I don’t like calling any one person injury prone, let alone an entire team. But this is something that concerned me coming into the season. This is a long season. This is a season that is going to have an all-star break and an Olympic break. The schedule will be a little more compressed thanks to that. Key players will want to go to their national teams. Like Ovechkin, Backstrom, Oshie and Carlson. All of those guys are older now.
Anybody can get injured at any time, but the older you get the harder it is to get rid of the minor things. The more miles you put on your body, the more wear and tear will start to show it’s ugly head.
The Capitals have gotten some good minutes from their younger guys so there is a plus there. Hopefully this is just one of those things that a team will possibly go through during a season. For some reason injuries tend to come in bunches. It’s better to get injuries bunched up in October and November than March and April.
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As of right now, injuries are a story. Hopefully, this is one of those stories that goes away for the Capitals as the season goes on.