Washington Capitals: Top Three Storylines Of The Early Season
By CJ Witt
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.