Recently the Detroit Red Wings made headlines snapping up coveted, young, 40-goal scoring top-six forward Alex DeBrincat, a player the Capitals were rumored to have been interested in. Considering General Manager Brian MacLellan made it known that he wants to make changes to the top six, this wasn’t surprising, but ultimately not in the cards for Washington…something which may have upset some Caps fans who really wanted DeBrincat wearing the red, white, and blue.
(Now he just gets to wear two of those.)
As much fun as it would have been to snag a player like DeBrincat, and as much as the Caps need a young, skilled player like DeBrincat, there’s an argument to be made that the Caps shouldn’t be making any major trades at this moment, for one simple reason: too much is unknown about the Caps roster and coaching staff to make a big move.
Here are some of the big questions facing the Capitals going into the season:
- Can new coach Spencer Carbery get Evgeny Kuznetsov back to first line center production, and Anthony Mantha back to being a 30+ goal potential winger?
- Can he incorporate the youth (Connor McMichael, Joe Snively, Ethen Frank, Matthew Phillips, Lucas Johansen, etc.) properly?
- Are the younger players like Rasmus Sandin, Martin Fehervary, Alexei Protas and Alexander Alexeyev) ready to take the next step and be even better?
- Can the power play be revived to be dominant again?
- Can the Caps stay relatively healthy?
That’s a lot of questions with a lot of potential answers. Say everything goes exactly right and Carbery works his magic with both the veterans and kids, the power play is clicking, and everyone stays relatively healthy. If that happens, the Caps are back to being contenders again – so adding a big time player like DeBrincat makes sense.
The issue is there’s no guarantee any of that happens, and if you spend assets on a player like DeBrincat, and the answers to those questions aren’t what we want, then you’re out of important assets you’d need to improve the team down the road. There’s no player in the league who could fix a team where all of those things above go wrong, let alone someone like DeBrincat (who is very good but no savior).
For now, the Caps should stay relatively quiet – maybe do a hockey trade, a player-for-player trade, but keep the high-end picks and prospects until some of those questions start to get answered. If things go south, the Caps will still have their good picks and prospects; if everything goes right this season, they’ll have assets to spend on mid-season/trade deadline upgrades to give them a boost. Alex DeBrincat is not and will not be the only good player available this year.
Of course, there’s always a chance they decide to make a bigger trade now as a way of showing the team and the fanbase that management is doing everything they can to salvage the remaining Alex Ovechkin years. It would just be a big gamble to take – one that could either pay off or hurt the team drastically.
It’s up to Carbery and the coaching staff to make the most of whatever happens, but it might be better, in the meantime, to see what this team can do first before dedicating important resources for a potential Band-Aid.
What do you think? Should the Caps make a play ASAP for some top six help? Or should they wait until they see if the current roster and coaching staff is worth adding to?