What Really Happened To This Year's Washington Capitals? Reflecting After Breakdown Day
The Washington Capitals reflect on breakdown day regarding what really went wrong at the end of the season.
ARLINGTON, V.A. — As Pierre-Luc Dubois went through the motions of the Washington Capitals’ breakdown day, he still hadn’t really processed that it was the end of the line.
Even staring out at the empty rink, he was ready to lace up the skates and go put in skills work. He felt he and his teammates should be preparing for another playoff game; and though he feels the sting of elimination, it just hasn’t fully sunk in.
“It didn’t even hit me that there’s a possibility that we could end,” Dubois admitted, adding, “I fully haven’t turned the page yet of ‘It’s over.’”
The season-ending loss is still raw — just 48 hours old to be exact — and cuts deep.
For a moment in the third period of that Game 5, it looked like Washington took on new life and was on the edge of turning the second-round series around against the Carolina Hurricanes.
Then, a fluky goal from Andrei Svechnikov with 1:59 to go in regulation was the dagger in Washington’s season, and in a flash, the Capitals’ successful season was erased.
All of the milestones, from Alex Ovechkin finishing off his GR8 Chase to Washington’s finish atop the Eastern Conference, didn’t culminate with the Stanley Cup, a legitimate expectation for D.C.
So… what happened?
Of course, you can point to a lack of offense in the series, tied in with Carolina’s high-powered lineup. But one of the bigger pitfalls for Washington was a lack of experience.
Just half of the Capitals’ roster had ever won a playoff round going into the postseason, and for several members of the team, the first-round series against the Montreal Canadiens was their first time advancing in the postseason.
“Half our team never played a game in the second round before, and it’s definitely a learning experience,” Dylan Strome pointed out.
Carolina, meanwhile, has advanced in the postseason for seven straight years, and has comfortably made it to back-to-back Eastern Conference Finals, and having that recipe for success and second-round reps also came back to bite the Capitals, who hadn’t been past the first round since winning it all in 2018.
“We were overwhelmed in a lot of different situations where I felt like guys looked different in that moment, even though they had great seasons, played really well against Montreal, just didn’t look like we were really comfortable in that moment a lot of times, and if you peel back the onion and think about why that is, experience has a lot to do with that,” coach Spencer Carbery pointed out.
That said, being the best team in the regular season no longer mattered; the playoffs were a different beast, and Carolina was the better team.
“You can just tell the experience and the calmness of their group through various points in that series. It's a great series for us. I hate, hate — and I won't be able to let it go for a while — losing a series to them, but it is a great learning experience to feel what that just felt like,” Carbery noted. “It was suffocating and guys had no space, could barely get shots off in that series.”
However, it goes beyond that; Washington was struggling before the playoffs. Injuries to Aliaksei Protas — who wouldn’t return until Game 5 against Montreal and still wasn’t completely at 100 percent — and Logan Thompson at the end of the regular season didn’t help the final record. But perhaps the most crushing injury was Martin Fehervary, who was ruled out for the playoffs after being hurt right at the end of the year and having to undergo knee surgery.
“That’s a huge, huge hole to fill… it was a huge loss for us, and I think we felt that,” John Carlson said.
“We knew, our players knew, our staff knew that when we lost Marty — and I don’t think the rest of the hockey world really knows — how significant of a player he is for our team… it was a significant blow to our back end,” Carbery added.
Tie that in with a lack of consistent offense and chemistry from earlier in the year, and Washington wasn’t in the spot it should have been in.
Going forward, the Capitals feel better equipped when it comes to what to expect, but know that it’ll take a whole new level of play in the postseason to get further.
“It just goes to show it’s so hard to win in this league… you win a playoff series, and it just gets harder and harder,” Jakob Chychrun said. “Looking back now for sure, that experience is huge and we’re going to need to continue that push.”