In life it’s a lot better to admit mistakes than continue living in denial. All last summer, after the Washington Capitals latest failure in the playoffs, I was very vocal in my opinion that the team should try to move Evgeny Kuznetsov.
It wasn’t unwarranted, I will still say that. Kuznetsov had his issues, his numbers were in decline and he was giving the Capitals seemingly more and more off ice troubles to go with those falling stats. He also has a high salary on a team that has been having issues with the salary cap, trading him could have brought back some value as well as helping your cap issues.
I was clearly wrong. Kuznetsov came out this season and was very possibly the Capitals best player to start the season. Some might say Ovechkin was, if it wasn’t him it was clearly number ninety-two.
Kuznetsov is having a rebound season no doubt about it. As I write this, the Capitals number one center has 72 points in 70 games played. He has 23 goals and 49 assists to equal those 72 points. This will be Kuznetsov’s best season since 2017-18 where he scored 83 points, 27 goals in 79 games played. And yes, we all know what happened that season.
If the Capitals had traded Kuznestov over the summer this team could be in a ton of trouble. There are plenty of reasons why trading him could have been bad. But today we are just going to look at three reasons why things could have been bad without the Capitals enigmatic top line center.