Backstrom’s Long Term Future Clouds The Capitals Short Term Future

The NHL draft has come and passed. We now move on to free agency. This is the time for teams to fill out their rosters. This is the time where teams will put supporting players next to the cores of their teams. The Washington Capitals like most teams have their core, it’s the supporting cast that is still a question mark.

The Capitals core is also getting older. That puts this off-season in the critical category if you ask me. Washington cannot afford to have bad or even questionable off-season moves any longer. With the current age of the core of this team, this side may only have two or maybe three shots at glory left in them, if that.

Before any move was even made this off-season the Capitals had to search for some answers from one of their most important players, Nicklas Backstrom.

Backstrom, who is likely the best center is franchise history, had another hip surgery several weeks ago. His second hip surgery of his career. I won’t go into much detail on the surgery, there are others who know more about it than me.

Bottom line, it is said that his recovery time will be a lengthy one.

That is not good news for a Capitals team that is somewhat against the cap and in need of doing some retooling to this roster. Backstrom’s injury puts a little bit of a fog on the Capitals off-season and what they are planning or what they can do to help the team in the upcoming season. At least in the short term.

Long term who knows what they can or would do. By long term I am talking trade deadline 2023. At that point the team should know a lot more and if their number one center can join them in the postseason, of course assuming they make the playoffs. We will obviously talk about that when the time comes.

Right now, to me, I have a hard time figuring out what this team can do. Lets just start with the obvious. This Caps team has been eliminated from the first round for four straight seasons. Staying status quo doesn’t seem like the right move to me, especially with other teams getting younger and better. Teams such as Toronto and New York, potentially the future contending teams in the eastern conference replacing teams like Tampa, Pittsburgh and Washington. Tampa not looking like they are going anywhere, anytime soon either.

The Capitals need to make moves. But what moves can be made?

We have already seen the team shake up the goalies which was priority number one in a lot of peoples eyes, mine included. So far they have shipped Vitek Vanecek to the New Jersey Devils. Just minutes before I started writing this news also broke that Washington will not offer Ilya Samsonov a qualifying offer, essentially making him a UFA.

I assumed Samsonov will remain with the team but come back on a cheaper contract. That still leaves the Capitals with a spot for a better starter. But that may not be the case.

Darcy Kuemper seems to be the best available target for Washington. Other free agent goalies have already re-signed with their teams or have their names heavily connected to other teams.

Signing Kuemper would not be cheap. The rumors or estimations have calculated that a contract for the new cup champion goaltender would be around $6 million. That is a big chunk of cap space the Capitals have left.

We have to remember that Backstrom will not play at the start of the season, so his cap hit is technically available. Tom Wilson will also be out for the first couple of months of the season. Wilson will be back, so you cannot use that $5 million cap hit. It also sounds like Backstrom will try his very hardest to play this season as well. With that in mind, you also cannot use his cap hit. You can’t go out and sign big time free agents with money you don’t really have.

If the Capitals were to sign Darcy Kuemper and the estimations on his contract are correct at $6 million the Caps only have about $3 million in cap space. They will have more because Backstrom will be placed on long term IR, but as we said, you can’t really use that on new players if he plans to come back at some point during the season.

At the same time, the team still has to fill out their rest of the roster. Currently the team only has five defensemen signed. It’s looking like that sixth spot will be a prospect looking to make his mark on the league. The guys that will likely get the look are Alexander Alexeyev and Lucas Johansen. Do the Capitals feel comfortable with their current group of defensemen and just adding those two young guys?

I would argue that team probably needs to add one forward and a defensemen to go along with their new goalie, whoever that may be. I just don’t know where they are getting the cap space to add all of this. With Backstrom missing the entire season it would be a lot easier to just use his space. Of course that adds or just delays your problems to next off-season if you were to do something big.

This is the dilemma the Capitals have put themselves in. An aging core that has done nothing in the past four seasons. And an aging core that is increasingly facing injury concerns. All that combined with the fact that this team does not have much cap space to make moves.

While the Capitals are going backwards, or maybe just standing still, other teams around them are getting better.

While you can’t put all of the “blame”, for the lack of a better word, on the Backstrom situation, that is potentially the biggest fog creator for the Capitals moving forward. If it was obvious he was going to miss the entire season that would give the team options.

Thanks to his injury and the uncertainty of it Washington is in a really, really tricky situation here. They need to spend big for a goalie to contend, they still need to spend money on other areas of the team as well and they just do not have that much cap space.

I have said it before. This off-season is crucial and it could be the biggest off-season in team history.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of questions that need to be answered, and those questions likely won’t be answered until well into the next season.