When you're working on a project it's very important to know where you are in the process. When you forget where you are mistakes can happen. Hopefully small mistakes, but annoying mistakes nonetheless. Mistakes that make things more painful down the road. Mistakes that make a project take longer than it should.
In sports that what building a team is. It's a project. It's a group of people putting together another group of people, at different ages, different skillsets, different personalities, different salaries, and hoping you got the right combination to have a nice final result. It's one of the reasons why sports are so fascinating to watch. There's no one way to put this project together, and we all can have an opinion and see if it works or if it doesn't work.
Every team needs to know where they are in their process. For some teams it's easier than others. Florida, the Rangers, Dallas, Vegas, even though they lost in the first round, Colorado. For these teams it's easy. We're good. We're very good. Time to buy and go for Stanley Cups.
Then you have the other side of that coin. The Sharks, the Ducks, the Blackhawks. We're bad. Very bad. Lets get picks, lets get prospects, lets think about the future.
Then you potentially have a team like the Washington Capitals where I think it may be very easy to make a mistake or two this off-season. And based on what I've seen some fans say, are hoping they make a mistake for some reason.
The Capitals are not a bad team, despite what you might hear some people say about them and their performance in the playoffs this past season. They don't need to be doing what the bad teams I mentioned before are doing. They don't need to sell and get as many prospects as possible.
But the Capitals are not good either. Just look at some facts. Last season they won 40 games, they lost 42. Does that sound like a good team? As much as I think this next fact is way, WAY overblown by the national or international media, they were a -37 in goal differential. If you're still trying to convince yourself this is a good team stop looking past the obvious things we look at to decide if teams are good or not.
The Capitals are not a good team, but they're not a bad team. Unfortunately this kind of puts them in that tricky middle category. It can be really hard to get out of this middle without doing something stupid that makes life really difficult down the road. The Capitals being a middle team is what makes this off-season really important.
This is an average team. An average team with a mix of pretty old and pretty young. An average team with a lot of cap space to use. An average team that snuck into the playoffs this season. And boy do fans love a couple of things. They love a young team that shows promise with cap space. I'm not sure you can make a sports fan drool faster than combing young with cap space.
But just because you have it, doesn't mean you should use it.
Connor McMichael, Washington Capitals / Geoff Burke-USA TODAY Sports
Focus on the future
While they are not really rebuilding, this is still a Caps team that needs to focus on the future and the young guys they have. They need to focus on guys like Connor McMichael, Hendrix Lapierre, Ivan Miroshnichenko, Aliaksei Protas, and you could throw Ryan Leonard in there as well. While you should never give jobs to people, they should need to go out and earn them, these are the guys you need to be giving every opportunity to succeed in the NHL.
Compare that to other things fans have said or written recently. What are some fans saying? Things like, "The Capitals should look into acquiring Mitch Marner from the Leafs!" or, "The Caps need to go out and sign a top free agent with all of our cap space. Someone like Sam Reinhart or Jake Guentzel!" why?
This is what I was saying earlier about knowing where you are in a process or in a project. That's not where the Capitals are right now. Teams like Florida, and Dallas and the others we mentioned need to be focusing on those guys. They are the contenders. Washington isn't and if they sign or get the top players they probably still aren't.
We don't know what Washington is yet, so why are we wasting money and cap space? It's easy to look at "bright shiny object" and get blinded by it's beauty. It's easy to see the light at the end of a tunnel and get excited.
We don't know if any of the Capitals young players are going to turn into anything yet. All of the guys we've talked about, with the exception of Leonard, have proven that they can play at the NHL level. There have been countless players in the history of all sports that have proven they can play at the highest level. That didn't mean they were great at the highest level.
Trust the process
The Caps still need to figure out what these guys are going to be capable of.
If you go out and sign big free agents to big contracts, or make big trades for big names you are banking on things that haven't happened yet, or banking on things not happening that could happen.
Signing big money free agents means you're banking on the young guys taking another step up. What if they don't? Now you have a big cap guy unable to do as much because he doesn't have the help. You'd be banking on the 39-year-old Ovechkin not taking a step back, or banking that he is going to have a full season of what he did towards the end of last season all season next year. Call me crazy but I'm not sure that's the best thing to expect from a nearly forty year old. Not to mention he could still get hurt, and as I've said countless times, it's harder to shake off dings when you're forty compared to when you're twenty-five.
But lets play the other side. Lets say the young guys do come out and play well. They prove they are the next leaders of this team. They play well, they put up good numbers. If all goes well, you're going to need to pay these guys someday as well. If they all end up deserving a pay day, well then you become Maple Leafs 2.0. You have to sign all of your young forwards to higher deals. Toronto did that. Then for some reason they went out and signed a high priced John Tavares, when they didn't really need to, and they've had trouble filling out their team ever since.
An argument against this is by time that happens you will have Ovechkin either gone or on a smaller deal. Backstrom's deal will be completely gone, Oshie won't be around and that is where you'll get extra cap space. As well as the rising cap, hopefully. But when the cap goes up so do salaries for individuals.
I get fans wanting to win and do so as quick as possible. It's not a fans job to think critically. Fan is nothing but short for fanatic. Fanatics don't tend to do the best thinking on anything. Thankfully we're just talking sports here and nothing more serious with bigger consequences.
But the more and more I think about it, the Capitals going and being big buyers or going big game hunting, it doesn't make sense. That's not where they are in their process. It could come quickly. Heck, it could come as quickly as next trade deadline if the young guys show they are your future stars. But they haven't shown it yet. Don't act like a contender before you become one.
The Capitals have a good amount of cap space this off-season. That makes them flexible. Don't do something dumb and make yourself less flexible. Buy smart. Acquire pieces than can help your team. That doesn't have to be the big guys with high cap hits. That comes later.
