Pre-Season Projections Reflect the Risk/Reward of the Capitals’ Approach

The Capitals’ entry into the playoffs last year broke the brains of every hockey pundit (and/or Twitter shitposter). The reasons why have been repeated ad nauseam. Their goal differential of -37 was the lowest of any salary cap-era playoff team. Their 5v5 expected goals share of 47.42% was good enough for the 25th-best mark in the league. They sold at the trade deadline for the second straight year. A first round drubbing by the New York Rangers served to confirm most people’s priors about this team; they ultimately didn’t belong.

Icing that roster did help give the Capitals a lot more flexibility this summer, something they wasted no time taking advantage of. They addressed the lack of scoring by adding Pierre-Luc Dubois and Andrew Mangiapane. They added more offense from the back end by swapping Nick Jensen for Jakob Chychrun, and further strengthened their blueline by acquiring one of the better shutdown defenseman in the league in Matt Roy. The trade for Dubois, in which Darcy Kuemper was moved to the Kings, also opened up room for them to add former Vegas goaltender Logan Thompson, hoping to create the 1A/1B dynamic with Charlie Lindgren that they were hoping to have in net last year. They’d spent the previous year and a half acquiring the assets they needed to reshape the roster, and they were finally able to achieve that this offseason.

These upgrades gave Washington’s 2024-25 lineup a much needed facelift, and seeing how what feels like a skeleton crew in comparison was able to sneak into the playoffs, conventional wisdom would suggest that the Caps should find things much easier this time around. However, with the season starting this Saturday, most analytical models aren’t seeing it that way:

The Caps, on paper, are a much improved team from what they entered last season with, but what they’re improving from is likely what’s driving most of these projections. By most metrics, this was a team that “should” have comfortably been in the lottery last year. It’s very possible that an improved Capitals team is simply a “normal” team on the fringe fighting for their playoff lives in April, and not one that has fans of certain teams (that lost to the Caps twice in two weeks towards the end of the season with a playoff spot on the line) calling for changes to the league’s playoff format.

Taking the route the Caps took to reshape this roster also requires taking a lot of risks, which is also reflected here. Dubois, Mangiapane and Chychrun are all more talented than those they’re replacing, but there’s a reason why each was available for the low prices the Caps were willing to spend. Dubois’ contract was one of the more maligned in the league after a rocky year in Los Angeles. Mangiapane was developing into an impactful two-way winger in Calgary, but he’s scored fewer goals in his last two seasons combined than he did in his breakout 2021-22 campaign. Chychrun’s value was tanked by a disappointing season in Ottawa with his contract on the cusp of expiring. All three of these players are coming to DC at a turbulent moment in their careers, having fallen out of favor with organizations that previously invested a lot to get them. The Capitals are tasked with being able to bring out what made those investments worthwhile in the first place.

It’s not far off from the position they found themselves in last offseason. The success of last year’s team also banked on strong bounceback seasons from core players, be it players returning from injury such as Tom Wilson or John Carlson, or guys simply trying to prove they still belonged on the roster in Anthony Mantha and Evgeny Kuznetsov. Compared to what they’re hoping to get out of the talent they’ve acquired recently, this is a lot less of a long shot than last year was.

Overall, I wouldn’t look at the projections as being indicative of this team’s quality, but rather its ambiguity. The methods they used to improve the roster give them a drastically higher ceiling, but it’s also not too hard to see where a whiff on one of these swings could sink them. They ultimately face an uphill battle to make it back to the playoffs, but that hill is a lot less steep than the one that faced them this time last year.