The time of death for the Washington Capitals’ 2016-17 season was 10:06 p.m on May 10, 2017. That is when the scoreboard clock and the Capitals simultaneously expired in a 2-0 Game 7 loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins in the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The cause is more complicated.
“It’s hard to say right now,” captain Alex Ovechkin said.
“I don’t really know what to say about it right now,” goaltender Braden Holtby said.
“I expect the same questions over and over again when you lose,” forward Nicklas Backstrom said.
Washington’s dressing room had more questions than answers for how the Capitals found themselves saddled with another postseason disappointment, the best regular-season team again flamed out in early May. The future is just as unclear now after the team squandered what could be its last best chance to win a championship with franchise cornerstones Ovechkin and Backstrom.
“As I said to everybody in the room, I hope you get this opportunity again,” Coach Barry Trotz said. “You don’t know if you will. You don’t know if you’ll ever get back to the playoffs. … When you lose the right to keep playing, when you’re in the playoffs and you feel that you can be a team that can do some damage, it always is a bitter pill to swallow.”
That bitter taste has lingered. All nine postseason trips with Ovechkin and Backstrom have fallen short of the conference final, and after it once appeared an inevitability that a Stanley Cup was in the franchise’s future with those two stars, it now seems like a stretch with the organization thin on high draft picks and facing a summer of significant roster turnover. Backstrom will be 30 next season and Ovechkin will be 32 after already showing a considerable decline in his goal-scoring and five-on-five play this season. He will miss the World Championships, his usual post-playoff pursuit, as he recovers from knee and hamstring injuries.
These Capitals will be survived by 11 players under contract through at least next season. Six others are restricted free agents, most of which are expected to re-sign with the team. Five will be unrestricted free agents this summer, and with salary-cap constraints looming, it’s possible all five – T.J. Oshie, Justin Williams, Karl Alzner, Kevin Shattenkirk and Daniel Winnik – will be forced to move on.
“I think we’ve tried to create a sense of urgency here, even starting last year that this is it here,” General Manager Brian MacLellan said in February. “You have two years to figure it out, this group. That doesn’t mean that going forward we’re not going to be good, but … something’s got to give because of the roster we have. Something’s got to fall out and I’m not sure what it’s going to be, but it’s not going to be the same.”
What MacLellan once referred to as a “two-year window” slammed shut Wednesday night after the second of back-to-back, second-round ousters by the Pittsburgh Penguins despite thoughtful offseason tweaks.
Over the course of three seasons, the Capitals addressed blue-line depth, bolstered the top-six forwards corps, augmented the bottom-six by adding scoring depth and finally went “all-in” by acquiring Shattenkirk, the puck-moving prize of this season’s trade deadline, in exchange for a first-round pick and valued forward prospect Zach Sanford.
The cost of those additions was not cheap, and the Capitals now find themselves short on both draft resources and salary cap space.
Brooks Orpik’s $5.5 million cap hit for two more seasons is a strain on the team now that he’s 36 years old and played in a third-pairing role all season. Washington will struggle to re-sign Oshie and Williams because of the pay raises forwards Evgeny Kuznetsov and Andre Burakovsky, and defensemen Dmitry Orlov and Nate Schmidt are expected to receive in restricted free agency. An emphasis on improving the third and fourth lines didn’t pay off in the postseason when the team got just two goals from its bottom-six forwards against Pittsburgh, and one was from Ovechkin when he was playing with Lars Eller.
Brett Connolly, added on a team-friendly $850,000, one-year contract last summer, scored a career-high 15 goals playing mostly on the third line during the regular season, but he was a healthy scratch for Washington’s entire second-round series. When he was frequently scratched in the first three months of the regular season, he was unhappy with his role on the team and there was discussion of requesting a trade for that reason. Trotz then started playing him regularly, but in Washington’s first-round series against the Maple Leafs, Connolly played fewer than seven minutes four times before falling out of the lineup entirely. As a restricted free agent this summer, his future with the team now seems unclear.
So, after the Capitals’ roster seemingly checked every box in the regular season – a deep, stingy blue line, scoring from all four lines and one of the best goaltenders in the league the team struggled to grasp why that failed to translate into playoff success. Again.
Asked if there’s some impassible mental obstacle that repeatedly bests the Capitals in these situations, no player could muster a clear answer.
“It’s hard to say,” Alzner said.
“You wonder how much disappointment you have to put yourself through before you can find a way to get the job done,” Oshie said.