As the Washington Capitals slide further down the standings, head coach Spencer Carbery is trying to change the team\u2019s identity as it heads into the stretch run of the season. <\/p>\n
The Capitals, who suffered their fourth-straight loss on Wednesday, now sit 12th in the Eastern Conference standings, four points out of the final playoff spot. What\u2019s more dire is that each team ahead of them in the standings has a game or two in hand, and the Capitals rank 14th out of 16 Eastern Conference teams in points percentage. <\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of the day, we\u2019re just making too many big mistakes,\u201d Carbery said to the media<\/a>. \u201cI mean, I sound like a broken record, but that\u2019s just the reality of it. We\u2019re making massive, massive mistakes. And it\u2019s throughout, you know, you just can\u2019t in this league, it\u2019s just too competitive. You just cannot give free goals. And that\u2019s what we\u2019re doing too much.\u201d<\/p>\n The Capitals\u2019 latest loss was arguably their worst of the season as they fell to the Vancouver Canucks, 4-3<\/a>. The Canucks, who traded away Quinn Hughes<\/a>, their captain and best player, last month, had lost 11 straight games heading into the matchup and had won just 4 home games at Rogers Arena all season.<\/p>\n \u201cI think there\u2019s a lot of things going on that we\u2019re just making too many blunders that we can\u2019t cover up for,\u201d Carbery said. \u201cWe\u2019re just going to have to tighten up. Like, I think what we\u2019re going back to is, this is not the team from last year. It\u2019s just not. And so if we keep thinking that we are and keep banging our heads against the wall and coming up short and go, \u2018Why aren\u2019t we the team from last year? What\u2019s going on? What happened?\u2019 Instead of realizing, \u2018Listen, we might have to go back to a team two years ago that just checked and just didn\u2019t give teams anything.’\u201d<\/p>\n Carbery is referring to the 2023-24 season, his first as head coach of the Capitals. After missing the playoffs the year before under Peter Laviolette, the Capitals struggled early as they installed new systems. The team however ultimately squeaked into the playoffs during the final game of the season<\/a> after tightening things up as a group and playing a heavy checking game where they pounced on other teams\u2019 mistakes. Notably, the Capitals set the salary-cap era record that season as the team with the worst goal differential, -37, to ever make the playoffs<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was totally comfortable in a 1-0 game and (we) felt good about that and wanted to do that,\u201d Carbery said. \u201cAnd so, you know, that\u2019s what we\u2019re working with our group on, is there\u2019s nothing wrong with winning a game 2-1 and giving up 10 chances and it being a little bit ugly and a little bit of a fight in the mud.\u201d<\/p>\n The 2024-25 Capitals, by contrast, scored the second-most goals in the league (288), second only to the Atlantic Division-winning Tampa Bay Lightning (294), and had a goal differential of plus-54. Alex Ovechkin<\/a> broke the NHL goals record on April 6 and scored a team-leading 44 goals. The Capitals had seven different players who scored 20-or-more goals including Tom Wilson<\/a> (33), Aliaksei Protas<\/a> (30), Dylan Strome<\/a> (29), Connor McMichael<\/a> (26), Jakob Chychrun<\/a> (20), and Pierre-Luc Dubois<\/a> (20).<\/p>\n Carbery\u2019s comments about making games more ugly come after sharing his opinion that he thought the team\u2019s offense was missing high-end offensive talent that can produce points night in, night out<\/a> in mid-December.<\/p>\n \u201cScoring goals and our forward group, and an ability to create offense and finish, is always going to be our Achilles heel,\u201d Carbery said then<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s just how we\u2019re built. And with a 40-year-old Alex Ovechkin and, you know, go down the list of our forward group, it\u2019s just always going to be something that we\u2019re going to have to continue to work on.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re going to have points in the season where it\u2019s going really well, like it was for 10, 12 games there. And then you\u2019re going to have points where it dries up a little bit, and guys are not finishing at a high rate because we don\u2019t have those really, really high, high-end difference makers in our forward group that can do some of those things. So we\u2019ve got to do it by committee.\u201d<\/p>\n The Capitals have been without Pierre-Luc Dubois for much of the season due to core surgery<\/a> and have lost other players such as Tom Wilson, Aliaksei Protas, and Justin Sourdif<\/a> for swaths of time due to more minor injuries. Capitals GM Chris Patrick recently stated that the team is in the market for a \u201chigher-end, skilled winger\u201d<\/a>, and the team recently was linked to having interest for New York Rangers star winger, Artemi Panarin<\/a>. The NHL trade deadline is March 6.<\/p>\n While the Capitals could get a shot in the arm from a trade, they will have to figure things out themselves and soon. There are only 31 games left in the season, and how the team rebounds during their current six-game road trip could ultimately decide whether they reach the postseason.<\/p>\n \u201cIf there\u2019s ever a time where our urgency level, I mean, you look at our season is hanging in the balance here,\u201d Carbery said. \u201cLike, that\u2019s just a fact. I\u2019m not sugarcoating and I\u2019m not trying to overemphasize where we\u2019re at the Eastern Conference and what\u2019s coming at the deadline and all the break and how quick the deadline comes after the break. You name it. Everything is pointing to the fact that our season is hanging in the balance. And that\u2019s where we\u2019re going to have to dig in and give everything we possibly have and play like we\u2019re in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. I hate using that in the regular season and you never want to drum that up in January and say it\u2019s like a playoff game, but we are getting very very close to teetering on, if we don\u2019t get results here, we\u2019re going to be in a huge, huge hole.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As the Washington Capitals slide further down the standings, head coach Spencer Carbery is trying to change the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":423633,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[66],"tags":[385,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-423632","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nhl","8":"tag-nhl","9":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=423632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=423632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=423632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=423632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}