Dylan Strome and Pierre-Luc Dubois have a lot in common.
Both are centers and former third overall picks (Strome in 2015, Dubois the following year) who have bounced around the league a surprising amount for dudes who are not yet 28 and carry that draft pedigree. Each seems to have found a real home in Washington after being acquired for literally nothing (Strome) or in exchange for what seemed to be an albatross of a contract (although Dubois’s current deal, to be fair, could be described in precisely the same way). Both put up decent numbers at previous stops, but neither topped 63 points in a season; Strome has now done that in each of his two full campaigns with the Caps, and both players are on pace to do this season, with Strome currently sitting atop the team’s leaderboard with 47 points and Dubois two spots back at 40.
Much has been made of the tremendous job the Caps’ front office has done of reloading on the fly, and nowhere is that clearer than down the middle in the top-six forwards, where the team pivoted out of necessity from first the greatest center in team history then later arguably their best player in their Stanley Cup run to the current pair of journeyman lottery talents. (Okay, you could make a case that the reload has been even more impressive in net… or on defense… or in restocking the farm system… or behind the bench… all which speaks to the incredible work overall.)
Anyway, the ascensions and rebirths of Strome and Dubois raise an interesting question at the 50-game mark: who is the Caps’ top center? For nearly two decades, that question has generally had a pretty easy answer, Backstrom vs. Kuznetsov debates notwithstanding: whomever is skating to Alex Ovechkin’s right.
Now? It’s a little less clear. Strome leads the team in scoring and is on the first power-play unit (and, to the extent the Ovechkin-ness of it all matters, has skated nearly seven times as many minutes with the Caps’ captain); Dubois leads the team’s forwards in even-strength ice time and has seven more even-strength points than Strome (who has 17 more power-play points than Dubois). Strome boasts an impressive 55.3 face-off win percentage, while Dubois is just above break-even at 50.3, and it should be noted that 79.9 percent of Strome’s non-neutral-zone draws have come in the offensive zone, while that number is half of that – just 39.6 percent – for Dubois, which brings us to usage:

There’s that “Ovechkin-ness” – he who feeds the beast, eats (offensive-zone starts) as well.
So Strome and Dubois have pretty different roles. But how have they performed? It’s not as close as you might expect:

Uh… there’s that “Ovechkin-ness” again. That’s a topic for another day. For now, marvel at the year Dubois is cobbling together. Fantastic underlying numbers and flat-out elite results:

Three of the four players ahead of Dubois have won five of the last eight Hart Trophies as League MVP (and Mitch Marner ain’t chopped liver).
— Japers' Rink (@japersrink.bsky.social) January 29, 2025 at 11:15 AM
The question at the premise of this post – to the extent that any still remains – is a bit of a trick question, because it doesn’t really matter. It’s pretty clear which of the two centers has been better so far this season, but there’s plenty of context absent, not the least of which is the play of linemates (which, of course, isn’t totally independent of the center playing with them).
The bottom line is that Dylan Strome and Pierre-Luc Dubois give the Caps a solid top-two centers in both the present and the foreseeable future, and Spencer Carbery is figuring out how best to deploy the two, especially in light of the elephant in the room. For a team that has struggled to fill those roles since the Cup campaign due to injury, indifference and inadequacy, that there’s even a consideration as to which of the team’s top two borderline star pivots is The Guy is the real answer.