The Capitals Need To Avoid Injuries This Season More Than Ever Before

Injuries are a big part of sports. They are a big factor in hockey thanks to the physicality of the game. You are also batting around a frozen piece of rubber that really hurts when it hits you going nearly 100 mph. Injuries are going to happen throughout an NHL season. You cannot avoid them.

This season for the Washington Capitals I feel avoiding the bigger injuries could possibly be more important this season than in past years. We don’t know how many more cracks at the Cup the Capitals will get the way they are currently constructed. That proverbial window that we all love to reference seems to be rapidly closing on the Alex Ovechkin era.

The Capitals have been a very good team almost throughout this era. They have had seemingly countless opportunities at winning the Cup and have fallen short all but once. You would hate to see the window slam shut thanks to injuries.

While it may be more important than ever to stay healthy Washington is not doing well in that department already and we haven’t even started training camp yet.

We all know Nicklas Backstrom will likely miss this entire season thanks to a hip injury he has been battling for a while now. This is a particularly scary injury because we don’t know when he will return, and when he does we have no idea what he will look like on the ice.

Backstrom is 34, soon to be 35-years-old. If he does return next season and returns at the start of the year he will be playing mostly at age 36. Hip injuries have derailed careers before. We can all only hope it has not ruined the final years of one of the best players to ever wear a Capitals sweater.

Tom Wilson will also start the year on the injured list. Wilson suffered a leg injury early in the playoffs last season and that will unfortunately bleed into this new season. It sounds like a December return is the most likely scenario for the big bruising forward. That is two months of missed time totaling somewhere around 24-32 games you would guess.

Thanks to science and medical advancements a torn ACL, or any torn muscle or ligament for that matter, isn’t as scary as it once was. Wilson should be fully repaired and ready to go, but it will still cost him a quarter to nearly half of the season lost.

I guess the good news here is he will miss the first part of the season and not the last part. That gives Wilson plenty of time to get back up to speed and get comfortable and confident in his knee before the big games start in the later part of the season and the playoffs.

But, you’re still missing a big part of your team for a large chunk of the season. Wilson has a reputation of a cheap shotting goon, but we all know he is more than that. While he is very physical and can be known to cross lines he has become an incredibly important player in terms of production and seems to only be getting better.

Wilson has scored over twenty goals three times in his career and was well on pace to go over that again during the shortened 2021 season. Last season he scored 52 points in 78 games played. That was a new career high. He would have scored somewhere around 50-52 points the year before had he played a full season.

Twenty plus goals and fifty plus points is hard to replace. The Capitals will have to find a way for the first part of the season. We all know that you cannot replace Wilson though.

That is your injury situation going into the season. Two of your stars are out of action for extended amounts of time. Could the Capitals survive if another were to go down?

What would happen if the seemingly unbreakable Alex Ovechkin were to get hurt? In the past two years Ovechkin has missed 16 games due to injury, both of those happening late in the season. In his entire career before the last two years he missed a total of 29 games. Some of those due to suspension for not playing in all-star games, how ridiculous is that?

The Capitals captain is not getting any younger. This season Ovechkin will be 37. Wear and tear is real folks. It is insanely rare for someone to have a long and mostly healthy career in pretty much any sport. It gets that much harder when you get older. The bumps and bruises you got when you were younger don’t go away as easy. The bigger stuff you could play on now becomes much harder to play on and takes longer to heal.

Maybe he can avoid that big injury. I have no idea. But it is now two seasons in a row that the captain has suffered something that forced him to miss a handful of games. That was rare for him. Is the wear and tear catching up? We can only pray it is not, and can only keep our fingers crossed that something fluky doesn’t happen, like a blocked shot breaking a foot or something like that happening.

Another guy you have to be nervous for is T.J. Oshie. I love the way Oshie plays. He plays hard, he gets to the hard to get to areas, he battles. That’s a hard way to make a living. Playing that way you are going to get dings in the armor. For most of his time in Washington it seems like Oshie is dealing with a ding.

This will be Oshie’s eighth season as a member of the Capitals. In the previous seven he has played over seventy games just twice. There is a note to point out here. During the 2019-20 season he played in 69 games. That was a full season, he did not miss a game. That season was stopped due to COVID. You also have the shortened 2021 season where he missed just three games.

To me, it almost feels like you need to pencil in Oshie missing about 10-14ish games a year. These obviously are not massive injuries thank the aboves. But they are just those annoying little things you have to deal with.

Again, Oshie is not young anymore. The annoying little as we just discussed a second ago will be harder to get rid of now that Oshie will be playing at age 35 and 36 this season. The way Oshie plays, even though I really enjoy it, will invite injuries. Can he go through a full season without missing a good amount of time?

What about the other healthier stars of this Capitals team? What if John Carlson took a nasty shot block and was forced to miss a lot of time? That would be a massive hole in the defense. Say what you want about his two way game, just think about the offense lost and what he brings going forward. Not to mention the power play and with Backstrom already being off that.

The Capitals in my opinion have to answer some questions about the center position. What if Evgeny Kuznetsov was forced to sit out for a while? Are we suddenly looking at first line center Dylan Strome? If Kuznetsov missed some time early you would also be without 2/3 of your top line with Wilson also being out.

Darcy Kuemper suffered a freak injury in the playoffs. What if he got hurt again this year? Who are you relying on to win you games in the net? Charlie Lindgren? Zach Fucale?

The more and more I thought about it the scarier it got for me. Hockey is a dangerous sport. You could be covering your guys not far away from the net, hardly paying full attention to the play and WACKO! You get hit in the face with a puck. You lose a bunch of teeth and break a bone in your face, break your jaw.

You could just simply be in the defensive zone. A big shot comes in, you didn’t commit to blocking the shot, but now it hits you and you have a broken foot, ankle, leg, something.

Is this doomsday thinking? Yes. Doesn’t make it any less or more likely though.

The Capitals window is closing. They have two major injuries already and we have not played one second of preseason yet. What happens if another aging star on this team is forced to miss some time?

It’s going to be a tough season. The eastern conference is tough with a capital T. Boston, Toronto, Tampa, Florida, Carolina, the Rangers, Pittsburgh, there is seven really good teams right there. I didn’t even mentioned some of the teams on the up. Ottawa, Detroit, you would have to think the Islanders will have a rebound season.

I just named ten teams that should be competing for eight spots and I didn’t even name the Capitals. I also didn’t name a team like the Devils or Blue Jackets. Do either of them compete this season? The Sabres finished last season at 16-9-3. Do they make a bigger push this coming year?

If the Capitals get banged up this season it could be a rough season for them. A rough season is not the kind of season you want when that window is closing. That’s why I think this season it is so, so important for the Washington Capitals to stay healthy and avoid the long term injuries. Or any more long term injuries.