This season for the Washington Capitals and head coach Peter Laviolette has been mind numbingly frustrating. The reasons for this are not limited to one thing. You can blame injuries. Nicklas Backstrom has missed a ton of time. Tom Wilson missed a lot of time. John Carlson missed a lot of games. Even Alex Ovechkin has missed games.
You can blame players underperforming. Anthony Mantha has only 11 goals and 27 points in 64 games played this season. That leading him to spending time in the press box. Evgeny Kuznetsov has done his typical thing. Show up mostly when he wants to and this season it appears he hasn’t wanted to show up most nights. He has 12 goals in 73 games played this season. He still has 53 points, which is not too bad. But in a year where the team has needed help scoring goals he has not helped them there. Conor Sheary has also had a down year, having a massive goal drought that has only recently ended.
Something Laviolette cannot change that I think has hampered this team is the simple fact that this team is old. This is a franchise that is relying on a 37-year-old to be their best player every night. Ovechkin is one of the few, probably ever, who can still be your best player at that age. However, I personally don’t think that is a great strategy for a team.
I’m not sure you can put the blame on management there. Again, this season there have been injuries. There are also great players on this team who can step up who for some reason refuse to do so.
But we still need to look at the age of the key players on this team. We already discussed Ovechkin. Backstrom is 35-years-old on a surgically repaired hip. He is not what he once was. John Carlson is not old, but he is 33, and is another player that has played over 1,000 career games when you include the playoffs. Not old, but the miles are getting up there on that body. T.J. Oshie is 36 with over 1,000 NHL games combined. He is older and he plays a physical game that leads to injuries. We all know he is usually beat up during the season.
Coming into this season they were relying on Lars Eller to have a good year. The 33-year-old Eller who had started to show signs of decline. Marcus Johansson also got top line minutes at age 32.
I have been saying this for a couple of years now. When your team gets older you just simply have to pray that injuries do not start happening. The Capitals decided to hang on to all of these aging stars and the injuries came. We can blame injuries if we want, and it is a fair argument, but we cannot be surprised.
Bottom line, in my humble opinion, this team is not built very well. That blame should go to the front office and Brian MacLellan and not head coach Laviolette. We have seen some good moves by MacLellan trying to get out of this hole.
The Dylan Strome signing I think was a terrific move. Getting Sony Milano I think was a good move. The Rasmus Sandin trade was a potential steal. He may have defensive deficiencies, but to get a very good offensive defensemen at age 23, he could be your go to guy on offense from the back end for years to come.
The Capitals also have some prospects who have some potential. McMichael still has things to prove. Lapierre could still end up being good. Miroshnichenko could be good. Strome, Milano, Sandin, these three prospects if they can come in and turn into good players. Are they legendary players like Ovechkin and Backstrom? Likely no, but the team could do a lot worse.
While the future looks a little brighter now than it did a few months ago it is still the present and the recent past that needs to be discussed.
Under Laviolette the Capitals have had two first round exits in the playoffs. They will follow up those two exits by, in all likelihood, not even making the dance in 2023.
Laviolette was hired after the Capitals decided to part ways with Todd Reirden after two, very uninspired first round exits. Under Reirden the Capitals frequently looked uninterested during games. I say this about the way the team played under Reirden. They would out skill you, and out work you for about 15-20 minutes, overwhelm teams during that stretch and then hold on for wins, or come from behind to win. Then when the playoffs started they badly got outworked and hustled by good teams who would not let them get away with that like teams can tend to do during the regular season.
That effort has improved under Laviolette, but there are still times that the Capitals do not work hard enough and those times have still occurred during the playoffs. Like vs Boston in the 2020-21 playoffs. It has also happened a lot during this season and a lot recently.
During big games this season and big games that have happened recently the Capitals have started slow. This is a team that is in the playoff picture and needs wins. How do the players not come out firing and ready to go?
This kind of play and attitude has now happened under two head coaches. To me, that means changing coaches won’t do much. This is a team issue. This really bad problem is on the players.
Since winning the Stanley Cup in 2018 this is a team that has had a lot of trouble looking inspired a lot of nights. You shouldn’t throw a blanket over statements like this, it’s not all the players. But it’s way too many players at the same time.
While I am not here to defend Peter Laviolette’s job I do think it is important to point these things out.
If you think this team is well built, I don’t know what to tell you. They’re old. They hung on to some key players a little too long. The older you get the harder it is to fight off injuries. Defensively they are not that great. Offensively they are not that deep, which only gets worse when you do have the injuries.
This is a team that has shown us for the last four or five years they can and probably will get outworked by the good teams. Which has now happened under two different head coaches. If that happens under one head coach then fine. Make a change at coach. If it happens under two, and to one who is one of the better coaches of his time, then it is probably a player issue the management team desperately needs to fix.
Will Laviolette get another season with this team? Should he get another season or more with this franchise? I don’t know. I’m honestly not sure what the Caps should do.
If you want to start a rebuild or reset maybe it is best to just move on with a new guy. Maybe Laviolette does not want to be a part of a reset which would make the front office’s decision easy.
At the end of the day, this team has a lot of problems. Is the head coach one of those problems? Well, he hasn’t led the team to a better record.
But if there are fans out there that think a coaching change is desperately needed, or that a change from Laviolette is going to quickly make this team better I think I have some bad news for you.
I think the Capitals management has let down Laviolette by giving him a very flawed team. And that flawed team has failed him in multiple ways.