The Washington Capitals’ “rebuild” is officially over. Head coach Spencer Carbery believes the 2024-25 season was proof enough that the club made enough changes in a single year to contend for a championship moving forward.
“I think last year changed the trajectory,” he told Virginia Golfer’s Chris Lang in an interview for the magazine’s August edition. “We went from having to rebuild and get a lot younger and wait a few years to become a Stanley Cup contender to making some moves to where we felt like we could compete a lot quicker and be a Stanley Cup contender that we and the outside world anticipated two years ago.”
The Caps finished the campaign atop the Eastern Conference with 111 points and won their first playoff series since lifting the Stanley Cup in 2018. Despite the team eventually falling in the second round to the Carolina Hurricanes, Carbery thinks the team is set up nicely for the future.
“It’s exciting. We still have a lot of work to do,” he continued. “We know that we still have to build through our prospects and our young players and develop them because they’re going to be a key part of our future. But we also have a solid foundation with the players we brought in last offseason and the players we’ve already developed inside our organization.”
Carbery was awarded the Jack Adams Award as the NHL’s coach of the year in just his second season at the helm in DC. He inherited a solid core of foundational players like captain Alex Ovechkin, Tom Wilson and John Carlson but the roster owned the second-oldest average age in the league in his first campaign. Getting the opportunity to develop some of the club’s top prospects on NHL ice last year is something Carbery credits for speeding up the rebuild.
“After my first year, where we sort of squeaked into the playoffs, the narrative was that we were going to have to go through a rebuild after 2018 and with our veteran players getting to an age where they were going to retire,” he explained. “I think with making the playoffs, and some of the moves we made last summer, with the draft picks we had and guys like Ryan Leonard coming in, the development of Aliaksei Protas and Connor McMichael, the ability for John Carlson and Ovi and Tom Wilson to still play at a high level, all of a sudden we were able to compete at a really high level and play at the level of some of the best teams in the National Hockey League.”
The season revolved, in part, around Ovechkin’s chase to pass Wayne Gretzky as the NHL’s greatest goal scorer. Carbery said he and the team found a balance in being motivated by the chase and staying focused on the bigger picture at the same time.
“You had to pinch yourself at times through the season,” he described. “You would get into practice mode, game mode, into your daily responsibilities. Every once in a while someone would remind you, or you would sit back and you would think about it. And you’d say, ‘Oh my gosh, we are witnessing one of the greatest accomplishments in sports history, in the moment.’ You would just have to shake your head and go, ‘Wow, this is incredible.’ Then you would go back to work, to the next game, the next practice, the daily grind.”
With Ovechkin now just three goals short of becoming the first in league history to record 900, Carbery and the Caps will be looking to ride more of that momentum through the 2025-26 season and build upon their renewed success.