Jan. 21 vs. Vancouver Canucks at Rogers Arena
Time: 10:00 p.m.
TV: MNMT
Radio: 106.7 THE FAN/Caps Radio Network
Washington Capitals (24-20-6)
Vancouver Canucks (16-28-5)
Washington’s six-game road tour continues on Wednesday night in Vancouver when the Caps seek to halt a three-game slide in their second and final meeting with the Canucks this season. Way back in October, the Canucks handed the Caps a 4-3 setback in a Sunday matinee match in the District.
This is the second time this season the Caps have gone three straight games without collecting a point; the first was from Oct. 25-31.
The Caps started their current trip Monday afternoon in Colorado against the League-leading Avalanche. Washington stayed within a goal of the juggernaut Avs for the better part of 50 minutes, but a pair of late goals lifted the Avs to a 5-2 victory, handing the Caps their third straight regulation loss.
Prior to Monday’s game, Caps coach Spencer Carbery discussed the need for his team to limit their mistakes.
“I think it’s just a little more of that where right now we’re making call it 30 mistakes in a game, and we need to cut that down to 15,” said Carbery. “If we get just one play here or there per guy, I think we’ll get this thing right.”
Whether the Caps succeeded in trimming the number of mistakes on Monday is for the coaching staff to determine. Although the Capitals played a hard and spirited game in which they hung in against a team that was clearly quicker and more skilled than them, a few critical mistakes cost them, as Carbery pointed out postgame.
Fifty games into the season, the play of three of the team’s least experienced players at the NHL level has been a highlight for the organization. Rookies Ryan Leonard and Justin Sourdif have been as good or better than advertised, and the play of Ethen Frank has also been a revelation. Frank helped set up the Caps’ first goal on Monday and he scored the second one.
But as Carbery noted, young players and players with limited NHL experience are still learning the nuances and the fine points of their craft in the best League on the planet. And that process takes time and unfortunately, a few mistakes as well.
“It’s exactly what I said before the game,” says Carbery. “I’ll give you an example; obviously in the third period, we make a bunch of mistakes, and this is what you have to understand. We’ve got a lot of young players that are going through this for the first time.
“Okay, so you look at the second period. [The score is] 1-1, right? There is a key moment in that period if you remember back. Ryan Leonard, young player. Okay, so he’s going through this for the first time. He throws a behind the back pass [in his own end], he thought it was [safe].
Leonard’s pass was picked off and it resulted in a shot off the crossbar from Colorado’s Ross Colton, extending a defensive zone shift for the Capitals against the high octane Avalanche.
“Sourdif gets a puck,” Carbery continues. “Now, all of a sudden, he goes cross-ice. It gets picked off. So there’s two situations in a 1-1 game on the road in a hostile environment. And now we take a four-minute penalty right after that sequence. And now, all of a sudden it’s 2-1, Colorado.
“My point is it’s a hard League to learn. And those guys are fighting their asses off, they’re playing hard, they’re learning on the fly, they’re doing a lot of good things. But those are just examples of some of the plays we’re making. Late in the game, we mismanage [the puck], we get beat 1-on-1, a puck behind the net.
“Those little things right now are just making those astronomical mistakes. And when it happens, it’s no different than what I explained. Now you take a four-minute penalty. And you don’t think, ‘Well, they didn’t score on that turnover, Carbs, what’s the big deal?’ Well, we took a four-minute penalty on that, and now it’s 2-1.”
We recall a rookie center named Nicklas Backstrom inadvertently throwing a puck into his own net in a crucial nationally televised late-season game against the rival Penguins late in the 2007-08 season. Or gifted young defenseman Sergei Gonchar making an egregious turnover in his own end on an exit bid, leading to the game-winning goal against in a Stanley Cup playoff game. Both players were inconsolable in the immediate aftermath of those gaffes, and both went on to Hall of Fame worthy careers.
Hockey is and always has been a game of mistakes, and younger players soon figure out that what they could get away with in junior hockey, collegiate hockey or minor league hockey is different in the NHL. And when you make mistakes against a team as good as the Avalanche is this season, on the road in their building, you put yourself behind the eight-ball.
On Wednesday, the Caps face a Vancouver team that has already made two significant trades this season, trades in which the Canucks are looking ahead to the future. Last month, they sent team captain Quinn Hughes to Minnesota for an appealing package of three young players and a first-round pick in the 2026 NHL Draft.
And over the weekend, the Canucks wheeled winger Kiefer Sherwood to San Jose for a pair of second-round picks and right-handed AHL defenseman Cole Clayton.
Two seasons ago, in 2023-24, the Canucks finished with 50 wins and 109 points, good for a Pacific Division title. After taking out Nashville in the first round of the Stanley Cup playoffs, Vancouver pushed Edmonton – the eventual Stanley Cup Finalist from the Western Conference – to seven games in a second-round series.
But after missing the playoffs with a 90-point season in 2024-25, Vancouver underwent an offseason coaching change and is in its first season under the bench direction of longtime NHL defenseman Adam Foote.
When the Canucks defeated the Caps in the District, it gave them a modest three-game winning streak and pushed them two games above .500 (4-2-0), which has proven to be their high-water mark of the season.
Since cobbling together a season-high four-game winning streak in mid-December, in the immediate aftermath of the Hughes trade – Vancouver has been in free fall. The Canucks are currently lugging an 11-game winless streak (0-9-2), the longest in franchise history.
Vancouver is 1-11-2 since its winning streak ended, and it hasn’t won in regulation in over a month, since a 4-1 win over the Islanders in New York on Dec. 19.
