Caps Set for Draft, Roster Revamping

Ten days have passed since the Colorado Avalanche lifted the Stanley Cup on June 26 in Tampa Bay, and late Wednesday night the coveted chalice's delayed delivery to Montreal finally took place, less than 24 hours before the start of the 2022 NHL Draft here in Quebec. After two straight years of "Zoom drafts" as a result of the ongoing pandemic, the League is conducting its draft "live" for the first time since 2019 in Vancouver. The first round of the draft will play out on Thursday night, and rounds 2-7 will follow on Friday.

For the NHL's 32 general managers, this is prime roster building season. In the modern NHL, teams are mainly constructed over the summer. In the salary cap era, significant in season swaps of players have proven more difficult to engineer, and teams tend to live or die with the personnel alterations made around the draft and the first few weeks of summer, perhaps with some additional moves or tweaks near the trade deadline.
Caps general manager Brian MacLellan will have his hands full in the weeks ahead, seeking to improve his team's netminding, a stated goal as soon as the Caps were ousted from the 2022 Stanley Cup Playoffs just under two months ago. But MacLellan has other areas of roster concern, too.

Star center Nicklas Backstrom underwent hip resurfacing surgery in Belgium last month, and he is expected to miss the first several months of the upcoming season, and that's a best-case scenario. Washington winger Tom Wilson is also expected to miss the season's first several weeks after undergoing offseason knee surgery.
As he seeks roster upgrades, MacLellan must navigate the salary cap while finding a way to keep his team competitive until Wilson and Backstrom are healthy enough to return to the lineup.
"The timeline is uncertain," says MacLellan of Backstrom's ongoing recovery. "I think everybody's happy - the trainers and the doctors - with the surgery, the results of the surgery. I think it's Nick's intention to come back and play at some point this year. And the timeline of that will be uncertain as his recovery comes. We'll monitor that as we go forward and make a decision down the line, during the season."
Washington will be able to put Backstrom on long-term injured reserve, where his $9.2 million salary cap hit won't count toward the NHL's $82.5 million salary cap for the 2022-23 season. But because they're expecting Backstrom to return at some point during the season, it's not like MacLellan can go out and acquire or sign a player at a similar cap hit to fill in during Backstrom's absence, because it would create a salary cap overage predicament as soon as Backstrom returned.
"The salary cap is the salary cap," says MacLellan. "We have to plan for Nick coming back at some point to use that space, his salary. What we can do is we can give opportunities to our young guys.
"It's not like we can go out and sign a $9 million player. We're anticipating Nick comes back at some point until that goes away. We're planning on him coming back."
As they did last season, the Caps will need a strong start to keep them buoyant in the standings until Wilson and then Backstrom return. Also as they did last season and as MacLellan indicated above, the Caps will rely on a bevy of young players who showed themselves well in NHL trials of various length last season. That group includes the likes of forwards Axel Jonsson-Fjallby, Maxime Lapeierre, Brett Leason, Beck Malenstyn, Garrett Pilon, Aliaksei Protas and Joe Snively and defenseman Lucas Johansen. Washington will also be looking for improvement and a bigger role for sophomore center Connor McMichael, the most likely candidate to hold down the second line center spot until Backstrom's return.
"I think we're going to rely on it," says MacLellan of the youth brigade. "We have some guys who had good years and had good starts last year. McMichael, I think we're looking for him to make the next jump to the next level with his play. Lapierre, we're kind of curious to see where he comes in this year. Protas had a good year, Leason had a good year, Axel Jonsson-Fjallby had a good year. Lucas Johansen had a good year in Hershey; he'll get a good look this year. Snively played well until he got hurt.
"We have a lot of young guys and there is going to be some opportunity here. We'll see if they can get their game to the next level, and there's going to be a good chance [for them] to start the year on our team."
After the Caps were bounced from the playoffs in mid-May, MacLellan indicated a desire to upgrade the team's goaltending, which has been mainly manned by the duo of Ilya Samsonov and Vitek Vanecek for the last two seasons. But the Caps are one of many NHL clubs seeking to improve at that position, which should make for some interesting jockeying for the impending unrestricted free agents at that position as well as those who might be available via the trade route.
On Thursday, the first move was made in the goaltending market when the New York Rangers shipped Alexandar Georgiev to Colorado. That move may indicate that the Avs aren't interested in retaining impending UFA goaltender Darcy Kuemper, who could be a fit in Washington as well as several other cities around the League.
"There's openings and there's guys available," says MacLellan, speaking specifically on the goaltending market. "I think teams are being aggressive and assertive and pursuing. Obviously, you've got to wait until free agency for a couple of these guys; they might re-sign with their current teams. There's only so many goalies available and so many spots, and it's a competitive environment with a lot of teams competing for these guys."
Trades will be made around the League over the next several weeks, with the first of those moves coming Thursday and Friday at the draft here in Montreal. At noon on Wednesday, the free agent market opens for business, and teams will begin revamping their rosters via that avenue as well.
"I think it's similar to other years," says MacLellan. "You pursue the trade market to see if something makes sense and then you can materially change your team. But at the same time, you're looking at the free agent market and seeing if something makes sense there and weighing the cost of the trade versus the free agent market and what you can accomplish in the free agent market. It's kind of a balancing act, and you've got to sort it out at the end here and hopefully we can make some decisions to make our team better."
Walking the streets of Montreal these last couple of days and nights, you can't walk more than a block or two without encountering someone from the world of hockey. Having a live draft after two years of conducting one of the NHL's signature annual events is uplifting, and it's been great to be able to renew acquaintances, break bread and clink glasses with friends and peers around the League.
"That's really exciting actually," says Caps assistant general manager Ross Mahoney, who has engineered Washington's draft day since 1998. "That's all part of that atmosphere that we have. It's almost like when you're playing and you have that pregame warmup and the nervousness, and then you drop the puck.
"It was just a little bit different being in our war rooms and doing it on Zoom. And we've hired some young scouts that have been with the organization for three years and they haven't been to a draft yet. So it will be really exciting for them. But yeah, you're bringing all the teams into Montreal here, a great city and there will be a buzz there. And you're going to have 21,000 people the first night for sure, so I'm excited about it. And it's the way it should be."

The Caps hold the 20th overall pick in the first round, and as they head to the draft floor at Bell Centre on Thursday evening, they also hold the 46th overall choice in the second round and the 85th overall pick in the third round. Washington does not have a pick in the fourth round, and it will select at 149 overall in the fifth round, at 181 in the sixth round, and at 213 in the seventh round.
As always, the Caps' hockey operations brass has a short list of players it will be targeting early in the draft, hoping to draft and bring two or three of those players back to Washington for the team's summer development camp next week.
"There's actually four or five guys we have a lot of interest in, and they kind of vary in position," says Mahoney of the 20th overall pick. "Some of them are forwards and some of them are defensemen. But we feel it's a really good spot to be in, and an opportunity to get a really good young player to add to our system."
Traditionally, the Caps haven't been shy about being aggressive and moving up to claim a player they really like. Whether that's something we should look for in the first round or the later rounds - or both - remains to be seen and will depend upon how things play out ahead of them.
"It seems to be there's some teams that are looking to move their first-round pick, and they would use it to trade for a more established player," says MacLellan. "I get the sense that that's going on in a couple of different areas. That will happen probably with a couple of teams and then the rest of the teams will try to improve through free agency."