Closer Than I Appear – The Caps take the ice at Capital One Arena tonight, doing so for the first time in over four months when they face the Boston Bruins in the penultimate preseason tune-up for both teams. These two teams will tangle on the same ice sheet again in less than a week; the Caps and Bruins open their 2025-26 regular season slate here on Wednesday.
Take A Good Look – With only two preseason games remaining, the Caps’ lineup still features many young players who are on the verge of starting their pro careers this season, and many of those prospect hopefuls have gotten more game action than they’d see in a typical training camp. Washington’s coaching staff has also looked at these players in various slots in the lineup; players such as Andrew Cristall and Ilya Protas have played on the first line and the fourth line and lines in between, as have others.
“I think it’s good,” says Washington winger Ethen Frank. “You get a mix of different guys in different lineups, just to see how other guys play. And you can take take things from certain guys on different lines and see what works and what doesn’t. But I think it’s been going pretty well. I’m just trying to stack good days on top of good days and just get better as I go along.”
Frank will appear in his fourth preseason game tonight, and he’ll be on the third line for the second time; his other two appearances were both with the first line of that game.
Cristall is making his third appearance tonight and Ilya Protas his fifth. Cristall is on the fourth line tonight while Protas centers Ivan Miroshnichenko and Alex Ovechkin on the first line.
“It’s been great,” says Cristall. “I think playing with everybody, everyone is such a good player so no matter who you’re playing with it’s a lot of fun out there. I think it’s building chemistry. I played last time with [Hendrix] Lapierre and [Sheldon] Rempal and I thought we did really well; I thought we fed off each other really well.
“And whoever I’m playing with tonight, it’s just building chemistry and working with each other, and it’s been a lot of fun.”
The Caps expect to have as many as 11 players beginning their first full seasons as North American professionals in 2025-26, and that – plus the fact that virtually all of the young players and bubble players have played really well through camp and the exhibitions – and some other factors have led to repeated viewings of more players than usual, and to 33 players still being in camp with less than 100 hours remaining between now and Monday’s 5 pm deadline for submission of opening night rosters.
“I’ll be dead honest with you,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “There’s not a lot of separation; there’s been a lot of positive bright spots in camp thus far, especially with the guys that are battling for spots. So, it may be some small, little details or some little things inside of individual players’ games that puts them over the top.”
Washington still needs to trim at least 10 players from its camp roster, and the roster is typically down to the last two or three cuts by this stage of camp.
“No doubt,” says Carbery. “And I think it’s to what I talked about the other day, of just having four games in this last week of camp. And what some teams do – and you’ve seen this throughout the League – is they’ll send guys down [to the AHL] and then call them back up to play [preseason] games. We just felt like to do that, to send someone down for two or three days and then bring them back up [wasn’t something we wanted to do]. And that’s part of probably ‘my’ stance, and to each his own, I think.
“Some head coaches like to get to their group right away; there is an A group of NHL players and there’s a B group. Some like to make cuts right away and send guys down, and just get us to the [last] 25 [players]. I personally don’t have an issue with running a practice with some extra guys or having a secondary group. We have a ton of staff around here; we can run two sessions. It hasn’t been a hindrance to our day-to-day operation. From an evaluation standpoint, it just makes it a little more challenging, where now you’re making key, key decisions right up to the end of camp.”
And as noted earlier, the coaching staff has moved those pieces up and down the lineup and depth chart, mostly on a vertical basis, but occasionally horizontally as well. An example of the latter is Justin Sourdif sliding from his right wing slot to the middle of the ice on Washington’s third line for tonight’s game.
“One of our goals at camp was to see Justin play center,” says Carbery. “I think he told me he played 80 percent wing and 20 percent center last year, and his first two years in the American League he was a centerman. So to be able to look at that, give him some reps there before the start of the season, it gives us as a coaching staff, but also him some reps there so he is comfortable, in case the time comes that we need him there.”
As to the rest of the remaining group and the vertical movement up and down the lineup, Carbery also attributes it to what Yogi Berra would have called, “deep depth.”
“I would also put another point [forth], [which] is the quality of the players that have come in,” says Carbery. “And that’s young players that are now turning pro, and also some of the additions, i.e. Rempal, Graeme Clarke, Sourdif, these types of players.
“Now, if you look at our pool of players – the 50 contracts or whatever it is [44 currently], it’s just elevated the entire group. It’s just deeper I feel like, and I think that’s why we’ve had success, even though we’ve dressed the minimum amount of veterans almost every single game – at eight – which I think we’ll do again tonight. And we’ve been successful at that, so that’s a lot of young players that are trying to break into the League.
“There are a lot of guys in this organization that are right on the cusp of playing in the NHL.”
Gonna Move – On Wednesday, the Caps loaned defenseman David Gucciardi to Hershey and they placed defenseman Louie Belpedio and forwards Graeme Clarke, Henrik Rybinski and Bogdan Trineyev on waivers for the purpose of loaning them to Hershey. All four players placed on waivers cleared at 2 pm this afternoon.
Those moves leave Washington with 33 players (19 forwards, 11 defensemen, three goaltenders) on its camp roster.
In The Nets – A couple of nights after Logan Thompson went the distance – stopping 36 of 39 shots – in a 4-3 win over the Blue Jackets in Columbus, Charlie Lindgren is the expected starter for tonight’s tilt with the Bruins, with Thompson dressed as the backup.
When the Caps defeated the Bruins in Boston in the preseason opener for both teams on Sept. 21, Thompson started and stopped 14 of 16 shots before yielding the crease to Garin Bjorklund just ahead of the midway mark of that contest. Bjorklund stopped all 13 shots he faced the rest of that, and that preseason opener is the only exhibition thus far this camp in which Washington split its goaltending duties.
All Lined Up – Here’s how we expect the Caps to look when they take the ice Thursday at Capital One Arena, and here also is a roster of expected Bruins for tonight’s game:
WASHINGTON
Forwards
63-Miroshnichenko, 62-I. Protas, 8-Ovechkin
72-Beauvillier, 29-Lapierre, 9-Leonard
15-Milano, 34-Sourdif, 53-Frank
28-Cristall, 73-Mateiko, 23-Rempal
Defensemen
6-Chychrun, 57-van Riemsdyk
42-Fehervary, 2-Iorio
41-Chesley, 52-McIlrath
Goaltenders
79-Lindgren
48-Thompson
BOSTON
Forwards
10-Tufte
13-Blumel
19-Beecher
21-Steeves
23-Lysell
38-Brown
42-Merkulov
47-Kastelic
51-Poitras
62-Duran
72-Harrison
92-Khusnutdinov
Defensemen
6-Lohrei
20-Jokiharju
29-Soderstrom
43-Harris
45-Aspirot
59-Brunet
79-Callahan
Goaltenders
70-Korpisalo
80-DiPietro
85-Zajicek
