WASHINGTON, DC — The Washington Capitals’ video team has been snakebitten to start the 2025-26 season, with head coach Spencer Carbery losing all four of his coach’s challenges in the first 11 games of the campaign.
Friday’s 3-1 loss to the New York Islanders saw the latest in the streak of failed challenges as Carbery unsuccessfully called for an offside review of Jean-Gabriel Pageau’s game-tying goal in the second period. Pageau scored shorthanded after he and Simon Holstrom got an odd-man rush, giving them the only goal scored on the Capitals’ power play all night.
The Capitals called for a challenge nearly immediately, believing that Pageau had put the Islanders offside when Holstrom entered their zone, but the NHL’s situation room in Toronto saw things differently.
For a play to be determined offside, the player’s skate must be fully over the line, even if it’s in the air. After reviewing the footage, the league determined there was not enough conclusive evidence to overturn the call on the ice.
“There was no conclusive video evidence to determine that New York’s Jean-Gabriel Pageau preceded the puck into the attacking zone before his goal,” the NHL wrote in its explanation of the decision. “Therefore, the call on the ice stands.”
Screenshot: Monumental Sports Network
Spencer Carbery told reporters postgame that he still stood behind the decision to call for a challenge based on the footage he’d seen.
“Yeah, it was tight, but we had it as offside,” Carbery said. “I mean, I can’t say it any simpler than that. The view that I was looking at it, and our video team had it as offside.”
Pageau’s goal proved something of a turning point, marking the first of three unanswered goals for New York.
“The shorthanded goal buys them some momentum,” Tom Wilson said postgame.
Carbery has expressed frustration with what he sees as inconsistent rulings on coach’s challenges in the past, but he also acknowledged the Capitals need to be able to pick their battles with more accuracy. He made a point to differentiate Friday’s offside challenge from the team’s prior three goaltender interference challenges, which he saw as two separate issues.
“I don’t group this with the goalie interference ones,” he said. “This one’s different. This one is offside. It’s either offside or it’s not. There’s no gray to it. And we had it as offside. So I don’t know that we would do anything differently because of the offside.”
Even so, Carbery knows there’s room for improvement, especially on the team’s goaltender interference challenges, which went one-for-two last season and currently stand at zero-for-two this fall. Those calls have been a frequent topic of conversation among the team’s coaching staff, which has monitored how officials have ruled around the NHL, but so far that work has yet to pay off.
“The goalie challenges we’ve talked a lot about our process and how that can get better and how we can improve as a staff of getting those correct,” he said.
Asked if the team would have to change its strategy on challenges moving forward, Carbery responded, “Yeah, it’s a fair point. I don’t know what to tell you. I think we’ve had some really difficult challenges that, if you go back and you go through the film, we look at every challenge every night from the previous night (around the league), you look at the four last night.
“They’re difficult, so I think ours were hard. And in some of the circumstances, a little bit (of the decision to challenge) was where we were in the game, etc. But certainly we have to reevaluate our process and make sure that we’re making the right decision.”