That the 2024-25 iteration of the Washington Capitals is much improved over the previous version of the club is well-worn ground at this point. They’re 48-17-9 (105 points) through 74 games after finishing last season 40-31-11 (91 points), and currently boast a plus-71 goal differential, a turnaround of more than 100 goals over 2023-24’s widely mocked minus-37-but-playoff-bound mark. They sit atop the Eastern Conference, one-point behind League-leading Winnipeg with a game in hand.
Roster gambles like Pierre-Luc Dubois and shrewd deals like sending Nick Jensen to Ottawa for Jakob Chychrun have paid off in spades, free agent role players have filled in admirably in said roles, and veterans have rebounded from subpar seasons.
It’s really been a perfect storm, but by no means just good luck – the team’s front office and coaching staff deserve every plaudit that surely will be coming their way, and the players themselves have simply been much better.
But how much better? And who? In a year of huge improvements at the team level, which individual players have bettered themselves the most?
A couple of obvious answers come to mind, first and foremost Aliaksei Protas, a player who looked like a guy with “decent third liner” ceiling who instead is doing something that hasn’t been done, well, ever:
Additionally, no player has ever ended an NHL season with 60+ even-strength points and less than two power-play points. Currently, Pro sits at 60 EVP and 1 PPP (5 SHP, though). The closest was Jim Peplinski 40 years ago.
— Japers' Rink (@japersrink.bsky.social) April 2, 2025 at 7:07 AM
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Protas’s five-on-five scoring rate has him nestled in between Nikita Kucherov and Kirill Kaprizov (just ahead of your Sidneys Crosby and Leons Draisaitl). At the risk of stating the obvious, Aliaksei Protas has made The Leap, and even as his on-ice shooting percentages inevitably regress, looks to be a very safe bet to outperform his comical $3.375M cap hit over the next three seasons.
Protas isn’t alone, of course. Dubois, like Dylan Strome a season ago, has reminded the hockey world why he was the third pick overall not so long ago, and is turning in a Selke-caliber season. The list goes on and on, so let’s put some numbers to the narrative. Below is a chart comparing the current Caps (sorry, not you, Ryan Leonard) to their 2023-24 seasons in the metrics that make up Evolving-Hockey‘s “Expected Goals Above Replacement” (xGAR) – Even Strength Offense (xEVO) and Defense (xEVD), Power Play Offense (xPPO) and Shorthanded Defense (xSHD), and Penalties Taken (Take) and Drawn (Drawn):
The first six conditionally formatted columns are those metrics detailed above (expressed as per 60 rates), the next three are Offense, Defense and Penalty roll-ups, and the last three are overall Goals Above Replacement, Even-Strength impact and Special Teams, respectively. Whew!
So what do we see? First of all, Anthony Beauvilier is fitting in nicely in a tiny sample. Cool. We love to see it.
But the biggest year-over-year improvement on the team? Tom Wilson:
By expected GAR, Wilson has been one of the best skaters in the League this year (after a pretty replacement-level campaign):
As you might have noticed in the Caps-only table above, the bulk of Wilson’s increase has come on special teams. The team’s biggest improvement at even strength has been Dubois (who has spiked in even-strength offense and defense since escaping LA), followed by Protas (who, unsurprisingly, has seen a massive bump on offense and a much smaller one on defense). The biggest even-strength offensive improvement, though, belongs to Connor McMichael, who is living up to the promise he had shown at previous stops en route to Washington.
And on the blueline, the numbers back what your eyes have been telling you: Rasmus Sandin has also taken a big step forward this season. (Note: Dylan Strome doesn’t show well here, but that owes largely to two factors: 1) he made his leap last year, and 2) he’s had to carry a defensive non-entity on his line for most of the season – xEVD is where he’s really being dragged down.)
Of course, xGAR isn’t perfect – there are things that actual Goals Above Replacement may catch that expected GAR does not (and vice versa), and things that we currently aren’t super at quantifying. But most if not all of these indicators pass the sniff test – the Caps aren’t just getting better results than a year ago, they’re a better team than they were a year ago because their players, generally, are performing better than they were a year ago. And hopefully that translates to better results than they got a year ago when it really matters.