Following a longer offseason than most folks in these parts would have liked, the Caps were back on the ice for the start of another training camp on Thursday – Caps captain Alex Ovechkin’s 41st birthday – at MedStar Capitals Iceplex. This season’s training camp will feature more giddy-up and fewer exhibition displays than any previous non-abridged season in NHL history. Training camp 2026 consists of four exhibition tune-ups packed into a tidy 13 days.
There’s no time for crawling or walking or even jogging; NHL teams will need to sprint to the starting gate this fall as they navigate the brave new world of the newly cobbled collective bargaining agreement and a significantly shorter training camp.
We saw one of the signs earlier in the week; the Caps have already reassigned all four players they selected in the 2026 NHL Draft. You’ll see another one soon when AHL Hershey opens its training camp mere days after the Caps do so, instead of a week to 10 days later as we’ve been accustomed to over the last couple decades.
With only four preseason games, with veterans limited to playing no more than two of them, and with a number of new faces in camp, the Caps opened camp on Thursday with a slimmed down roster of 52 players in two groups on the ice, rather than the three groups and nearly 70 players we’ve seen routinely going back to the previous century.
Those two groups (see below for breakdown of the two groups) were clearly marked as a “varsity” group, one that could easily be projected to an opening night roster for the season opener in Carolina on Oct. 1 and another that looks close to what you might expect the AHL Hershey roster to look when the Bears open the 2026-27 season Oct. 3 against Charlotte.
“I think you saw one of the changes out there today; it's basically our NHL group [on day one], which we haven't done in my time here, and it is rare,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery as he prepares for his fourth season behind the Washington bench. “Some teams do it from year to year, but just with the limited [practices and exhibition games] and the change in the CBA to the training camp being shortened, I think you're going to see a lot of teams around the league going to this format because you just don't have as much time to get your group together, create that chemistry, get everybody on the same page [with] communication.
“And then I think with the new faces as well, it was important to get basically our NHL group together as quickly as we possibly could. So, that's the way that our camp will look group-wise.
“Now to say that, if you're writing off guys in Group B or in the second group, there's a lot of guys there that are still going to fight for whether there's an injury, whether they get into an exhibition game, and they really impress. There'll be plenty of opportunity for that through training camp, and through the exhibition games.”
Having a handful of newly added players over the offseason – as well as a couple of younger players like Cole Hutson and Ilya Protas who have had just a taste of the NHL to date – also increases the urgency to find that early chemistry within the forward lines and the blueline pairs.
“I think the biggest thing would be back to the line combination thing, because you hope that what we went out there with today works, but a lot of times, the chemistry just isn't there with the lines,” says Carbery. “So now you're going to have to pivot quickly, and so that would probably be the biggest thing that I've challenged our staff, myself, and talked to our players a lot about what fits well – ‘What do you think of this?’ And then we'll see how it plays out in the practices and in the exhibition games.
“We really want to see if we can find chemistry through those four lines as quickly as we can, because if you look at it right now today, none of those lines that we just played with finished the season or have played together for a consistent amount of time. None of them. We always know we can go back to [Pierre-Luc] Dubois, [Tom] Wilson, and [Aliaksei] Protas. We've seen that line before. We've seen [Anthony] Beauvillier, [Dylan] Strome and Ovi, but we've got all those guys in different spots. So that's going to be the key to camp for us, not only evaluating who's going to make the team, but where's our line chemistry at with our forward group?”
Strome had some thoughts on developing the quick and sticky chemistry that Carbery is seeking, and he believes the day one drills should help in that regard. Having guys get into town ahead of the start of camp and participating in “captain’s practices” can also be a boost.
“I think most guys are here the last couple of weeks to try to build some chemistry there, and to see all the guys and the new faces,” says Strome. “And today is just a little more organized, a little more structure to the drills.
“Yes, it’s obviously about finding chemistry. The benefit that we have is I feel like it’s a really tight team, and the chemistry just forms naturally. For us, just going out and having fun and working extremely hard, the chemistry will take care of itself. And we do a lot of drills where it’s two-on-ones and three-on-twos where you can build that chemistry. And you saw today some five-on-five stuff down low and going back and forth a little bit. I think that’s a great way to build chemistry, and to just continue it through camp.”
Shortened training camp also means the cuts to the roster come earlier, too, and GMs have to recalculate the optimal times to put players on waivers, particularly for those players they’re hoping to hold on to.
“In the old method of [handling waivers], I never figured out the secret sauce and what's the best time to do it,” says Caps senior vice president and general manager Chris Patrick. “It always felt like no matter when you were doing it, you were crossing your fingers for 24 hours.
“I think you just have to make your decisions and get down to as close to your NHL group as you can, as you get towards those last couple exhibition games, so that the players that are truly competing for a spot have a really fair shake at it, and you just eliminate some of the noise on the fringes.”
The Caps’ two practice groups will be back at it on Friday and Saturday mornings. A set of back-to-back exhibition games – Sunday in Boston against the Bruins and Monday in Hershey against the Flyers – follows, before the team can finally savor a day off on Tuesday.
Here’s a look at those practice groups from day one of camp:
Group A
Forwards
Tuch-Dubois-Wilson
Ovechkin-Strome-Leonard
A. Protas-I. Protas-Kyrou
Jenner-Sourdif-Beauvillier
Miroshnichenko-Brodzinski-Frank
Defensemen
Chychrun-Roy
Fehervary-Liljegren
Hutson-Desharnais
Holl-McIlrath
Goaltenders
Thompson
Lindgren
Stevenson
Group B
Forwards
Cristall-Dunne-Smallman
Lakovic-Niederbach-Trineyev
Schafer-Sikora-Parascak
Kopff/Persson-Mateiko-Suzdalev
Defensemen
MacDonald-Chesley
Muggli-Belpedio
Gucciardi-Allen
McDonald-Biakabutuka
Goaltenders
Bjorklund
Gibson
Kraws
Petersen
