From Alexeyev to Wilson, we’re taking a look at and grading the 2023-24 season for every player who laced ‘em up for the Washington Capitals for a significant number of games during the campaign, with an eye towards 2024-25. Next up, Charlie Lindgren.
The Bio:
#79 | Goaltender | Catches: Right
Height: 6’2” | Weight: 179 | Born: December 18, 1993
Birthplace: Lakeville, Minnesota, USA | Acquired: Signed as a Free Agent, July 13, 2022
Cap Hit: $1,100,000 | Signed Through: 2024-25 | Expiry Status: Unrestricted Free Agent
The Scouting Report (via CapFriendly):
Report: April, 2024 | Rating: 85 | Projection: #1B Goaltender
- Lindgren has provided the Capitals with capable goaltending for a long stretch. He’s part of the reason why Washington was able to sneak into playoffs as an Eastern Conference wild card team.
- In his last ten game segment in regular season he posted a .910 save percentage and a 2.65 GAA
- South paw. Butterfly style. Above average lateral quickness. At times appears smaller than his stature when dropping into butterfly / setting up hybrid / paddle down.
- Competes to stop pucks any way he needs too.
- Faced 289 shots in the segment – stopping 263 – allowing 26 goals against
- Washington team PK % hovers around 80% – Goalie needs to be best penalty-killer. Lindgren has provided the Caps some timely saves in the second half of the season.

The Stats:


The Charts:





The Key Stat: No goalie in the League had a heavier post-All-Star workload than Lindgren, who played 1645:37 of 2,110:11 total, starting 28 of 35 games and going 16-10-3/2.73/.908 with four shutouts.
The Good: After making more appearances at the NHL level in 2022-23 (31) than in his entire career up to that point (29), Charlie Lindgren apparently told his incoming bench boss he was hungry for even more. “I said to [Spencer Carbery], ‘Last year was me kind of getting the foot in the door. This year I want to blow the door down,’” Lindgren told The Athletic.
And blow the door down he did, leading a middling-at-best Caps team back to the playoffs by doing something exceedingly rare in the NHL: having a breakout season at 30-years-old (a milestone birthday he reached mid-December). Lindgren led the NHL in shutouts with six, finished in the top-10 in save percentage and goals against average, and gave the Caps a “quality start” (defined as a start in which a goalie’s save percentage is greater than the League average for the year) in 29 of his 48 starts (a very solid 60.4%, the highest mark by a Caps goalie since Philipp Grubauer in 2017-18 and higher than contemporaries like Jake Oettinger and Igor Shesterkin this year). For a Caps team that struggled to score goals, that was huge, and the team went largely as Lindgren did – when he allowed two goals or fewer, he went 22-1-2; when he allowed three, he was 3-6-3, and when he gave up four or more, 0-2-9. Obviously you can’t expect to win games when allowing more than four goals, but you’d like to win more than a quarter of the time that your goalie lets in three – help a fella out! (Fun fact: Jose Theodore went 10-7-5 when allowing three or more for the 2009-10 Caps.)
Of course, in many ways, for Lindgren and his teammates, getting to the playoffs was the playoffs. Lindgren started 19 of the Caps’ last 22 games, putting up a 12-6-2/2.39/.919 line with three clean sheets, and his 12 wins from March 7 through the end of the regular season ranked first in the NHL. And as the games got more important, Lindgren got even better – over the Caps’ last five games of the season, he went 4-1-0/.949/1.41; in the last three, 3-0-0/.962/1.00; and in the season-ending back-to-backs he was 2-0-0/.977/0.50. The Caps had several big performances at big times, especially in the second half of the season, but Charlie Lindgren was their most valuable player in 2023-24, and it’s not even particularly close.
The Bad: Well, the playoffs. MoneyPuck had Lindgren with 14 goals allowed on an expected 12.2, which is just under half a goal per game below expectations, which may not sound like a lot, but only one goalie that played more than 20 games during the regular season posted a worse mark (Chicago’s Arvid Soderblom); Natural Stat Trick had Lindgren at just 9.7 expected goals against, so an even larger gap between what was reasonably expected and what Charlie delivered, so yeah. Those models lack some context, of course, and we could discuss individual “should haves” and “could haves,” but the bottom line here is that the Caps needed Lindgren to be great to have a chance against the Rangers and he wasn’t, overall – given the Caps’ record when Lindgren allowed three goals in a game, it should be no surprise that they were a quick out when he yielded four, four, three and three.
Was Lindgren spent from his heavy workload down the stretch, was he exposed, did he regress, or was it just bad luck? Probably some amount of each. And he was by no means perfect during the regular season, with games against Detroit (eight goals against), Toronto (seven), Colorado and Buffalo (six apiece) leaping to mind. But hey, might as well get as many of ’em as you can out of your system at once.
One quirky little hiccup in Lindgren’s stellar season that probably is just random variance but warrants keeping an eye on is his performance in shootouts, where he went 1-4, stopping only 11 of the 19 of the shots he faced (57.9%), third-worst in the League among netminders who faced at least ten shootout shots. Maybe he can get some tips from stablemate Darcy Kuemper, who was a League-best 13-for-13 this year.
Lastly, Lindgren was unavailable due to injury or illness for a dozen games splits largely over two stretches in October and around the New Year. Given his bump in minutes and age, Lindgren’s durability is also worth keeping an eye on.
The Video:
The Discussion: It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which Lindgren isn’t the Caps’ #1 (or #1A) goalie on Opening Night 2024, but what do you think his ideal workload is in that role? Where does he rank among NHL starters? At 30, how long can he reasonably be expected to hold that spot? And finally, what would it take for you to give Lindgren a 10 next season?
The Vote: Rate Charlie Lindgren below on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the best) based on his performance relative to his potential and your expectations for the season – so if he had the best year you could have imagined him having, give him a 10; if he more or less played as you expected he would, give him a 5 or a 6; if he had the worst year you could have imagined him having, give him a 1.