Well, if you thought offseason trades were going to wait until after the Stanley Cup Finals, then Wednesday was probably a bit of a surprise, with a flurry of activity around the NHL. Apparently Washington Capitals GM Brian MacLellan wanted to get in on the action and made a big splash by trading Darcy Kuemper to Los Angeles for the enigmatic Pierre-Luc Dubois. It’s a move that has absolutely huge potential…but also one that could cause problems for the Caps for years to come if he doesn’t pan out.
Let’s dig in to see where Dubois fits, his potential and the concerns surrounding his game.
We’ll start with the good. If you set out to build the perfect hockey player, you’d probably make him bigger – think 6’4”, 225lbs, maybe make him a center who can skate quickly, plays physical, has good edges, quick hands, top-tier vision and passing ability, an above-average shot, and the ability to be an absolute pest on the ice. Dubois is all of those things, and just on paper, the fact the Caps got a player like that a week before he turns 26 is nothing short of amazing. He is such an embodiment of what the Caps are lacking: top tier skill and speed (with the bonus of being big, physical and a pain in the ass to play against).
Dubois’s strengths lay particularly on the offensive side of things. He’s always been strong in driving offense with his ability to protect the puck, using his speed, strength, and his playmaking ability to set up passes in the dangerous areas or be able to fire a shot himself from the front of the net. The playmaking part is huge because, as we wrote back in March, the lack of playmaking was maybe the Capitals biggest (although certainly not their only) weakness this season.
When Dubois is on, his speed, strength, vision, and hands can give opponents fits and make him very tough to contain – all reasons why he is both intriguing and potentially worth the gamble.
But that’s also what makes him frustrating to watch. He has this great toolkit but he doesn’t utilize it consistently. One game he’s chasing the puck down with his speed and winning puck battles with his body at both ends of the ice before dishing off a nice feed for a scoring chance or a clean exit; the next game he’s going half speed into the corner, not engaging anyone and barely back-checking. His consistent effort isn’t always there (something Caps fans are probably tired of hearing about, after dealing with perceived or real effort issues from guys like Evgeny Kuznetsov and Anthony Mantha the last handful of years).
The good thing about only having one real issue, though, is that if you can fix it, you are set.
And if there’s any coach that can unlock Dubois to his full potential, it’s probably Spencer Carbery. In just his first season he had to take on the Anthony Mantha case and somehow fix him – something a good, veteran coach in Peter Laviolette couldn’t even do – but Carbery was able to get Mantha producing almost instantly. Mantha was a project and Carbery is probably (hopefully) eager to tackle a new one in Dubois.
Carbery spoke earlier in the year to the Post’s Bailey Johnson about getting the most out of his players, and how he takes great pride in it:
Mantha was a big, skilled forward with consistency issues; Dubois is a big, skilled forward with consistency issues. It’s not hard to think Carbery can work the same magic on Dubois as he did with Mantha. And if Carbery can get Dubois going, then watch out, because Dubois probably has a much higher ceiling than Mantha.
Of course, it’s also important to note that for every Mantha success story there’s a Kuznetsov failure story, but they aren’t exactly identical situations. Kuznetsov had effort issues and off-ice issues, had already won his Cup, and is older than Dubois. There really hasn’t been anything negative said about Dubois off the ice, and he’s still young and hungry. There’s more of a comparable between Dubois and Mantha than between Dubois and Kuznetsov – and if Mantha can find his game, certainly Dubois can.
The biggest concern outside of his potential consistency/effort issues is Dubois’s contract. He’s going to cost the Capitals $8.5M a year for another seven years, which is not a small amount of money. If you remove Nicklas Backstrom from the list, Dubois will be making the second-most amount of money on the Caps. If he does not work out, that’s a huge chunk of the salary cap being taken up by one player who then becomes that much harder to move.
It’s also not a good sign that Dubois will be on his fourth team in just five years, although that may be overblown and there could be valid reasons why he’s moved around so much. First of all, his first team was the Columbus Blue Jackets, which…no offense to that team and its fans, but is probably not a highly desired destination for a lot of players. Heck, just last week, Patrik Laine was asking to be traded Columbus (somewhat entertaining considering the reason he was there in the first place was that he was traded to Columbus for Dubois). His coach at the time as a Blue Jacket? John Tortorella, notoriously one of the more difficult coaches to deal with, especially if you’re a rookie like Dubois was. It wasn’t a good match.
Then Dubois was traded off to Winnipeg – another not-great location. Just this year The Athletic did an anonymous poll among NHL players and Winnipeg was ranked the worst road city to play in. It received 41.24% of the vote, the next was Ottawa with 11.86%; that’s a huge margin. Now this poll was not about not wanting to play for the Jets as a team, just playing in the city of Winnipeg, but still, you would have to think it’s a city a lot of players would rather not live, therefore not play in. And remember Dubois had no choice in the matter when traded there.
Lastly, Dubois went to the Kings. The belief is he wanted to be the The Guy there, the number-one center – but with future Hall of Famer Anze Kopitar already in place, as well as Phillip Danault and Quinton Byfield, there wasn’t much room for Dubois in a top-six center spot. He was eventually bumped to third-line center and even spent some time on the fourth line as both a center and a wing. By the end of the season, he averaged the seventh-most ice time per game among the forwards.
So yeah. He certainly wasn’t The Guy. Even the Kings’ GM, Rob Blake, admitted earlier this week that it wasn’t a good fit.
It feels like a similar situation to when the Caps traded for Kevin Shattenkirk back in 2017. A good idea in theory to add, at the time, one of the League’s better defensemen to your team – but the Caps already had John Carlson and Matt Niskanen on their right side in the top four, leaving Shattenkirk on the third pair, which was just a waste of his talents.
So a big reason why his analytics look poor is because of his one season in Los Angeles and, as noted above, it just wasn’t a fit for him. Leading up to his time with the Kings, Dubois was looking like a much stronger player:
These numbers are against “Elite” competition. That DFF%RC is “Dangerous Fenwick ratio relative to team mates”, so basically high danger chances. Outside of his second season in Columbus and his one season with the Kings, he was a positive high-danger scoring player compared to his team when being on ice against elite competition. Look at his last year in Winnipeg when he was a +8.6DFF%RC and that was with 46.5oz%!
But in L.A., his five most frequent linemates were Laferriere, Kaliyev, Grundstrom, Anderson-Dolan, and Kempe, with Laferriere on seven of eight Dubois’ lines. Basically, Dubois didn’t spend a lot of time with the Kings top players. If Dubois was put into a top-six center position and stayed there, his analytics would probably have looked much better (and he probably wouldn’t have been traded).
There are a lot of directions the Dubois addition can go. At worst, his effort stays inconsistent and he becomes a middle-six winger that can get you 40+ points, which would be a disaster for a player you are paying $8.5M for another seven years. He could be a 60+ point second-line center, which is respectable (still not the return you want for $8.5M but livable).
Or – and this, of course, is what we’re hoping for – everything can hit right. Dubois wants to finally find a home and prove his worth consistently, and he becomes the Caps number-one center through his prime, putting up around a point per game while also being reliable defensively.
There is understandably a big concern surrounding Dubois, with plenty of reason for it. But here is the bottom line: the Capitals are not a good hockey team. They are at a point in their life cycle where, if they want to be competitive, they need to take gambles. Dubois is a young, talented player with first-line center ability. If you are going to take a big swing, Dubois seems like a good player to swing at.