Ever South – The Caps conclude their four-game, eight-day road trip – their first extended journey of the season – on Thursday night in Florida against the Panthers. The Caps are heading back home after tonight’s tilt with the two-time defending Stanley Cup champions, and they will play seven of their next eight games at home.
With a win tonight, the Caps can go home with four points and a split on what is a daunting trip in terms of the opposition, particularly the last three stops in Tampa, Carolina and Florida, respectively.
Facing Florida is similar in some ways to going up against Carolina in that both teams use their forechecks to attack and to create, and also to take the wind out of the sails of their opponent. Florida is a bit more judicious with its shot selections, but most teams are in comparison to Carolina.
And there are some similarities between how Washington wants to play, and those two ex-Southeast Division denizens as well. When you look at the teams that control the most shot attempts at this stage of the season, Carolina is on top, the Caps are third and Florida is sixth in the NHL, and those three teams are the top three among all Eastern Conference clubs.
“You're playing like the cream of the crop, Carolina, Tampa and Florida,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “To me, when I watch them play, I get excited, because that's the style and how they play is exactly how I feel like you win in this league, and how you win Stanley Cups. So anytime you get to play against these guys, and we just played Carolina, so we felt a lot of their [defensemen] pressure, their pinches, they're really aggressive, and they take time and space away and make you have to earn everything that you're going to get offensively when you have the puck.
“We're going to see that again tonight. So, just be careful thinking that just because you played it, you're going to have success playing against it again; that's not how it works. But you can very easily go back when you have success against a Carolina, Tampa or Florida, you can recall or show clips or [show], ‘Hey, here's why we were able to be successful, here’s how we got through the neutral zone against the Carolina Hurricanes.’
“A lot of those same things are going to need to be replicated again. It doesn’t mean it’s going to be easier just because we did it; those were hard things we had to do, but here’s how it looks.”
Blue Electric Light – As was the case last season, Washington’s blueline corps has again been crucial to the team’s success in the early going of the 2025-26 season.
With newly appointed – as of Wednesday – assistant coach Patrick Wellar running the defense this season, the Caps have again hit the ground running in terms of what their back end has meant to their overall success this season.
First and foremost, the Caps have permitted the fewest (20) goals against at 5-on-5 thus far this season, which is a credit to their goaltending as well as their defense corps, and the forward group is also part of that success, of course.
Last season’s Washington blueline corps also contributed 2.44 points per game to the attack, the highest rate of offensive contribution the Caps have gotten from their back end in over three decades.
Entering tonight’s game with Florida, the Caps again sit with an average of 2.44 points per game from their blueline group (11 goals and 28 assists for 39 points in 16 games), and with the blueline accounting for 31.2% of Washington’s point total, the Caps lead the NHL in share of offense from the back end this season.
The Caps also boast three blueliners in the NHL’s top 10 in expected goals thus far, this according to stathead.com. Jakob Chychrun leads all NHL skaters – regardless of position – with 19.0, Martin Fehervary is sixth among all defensemen at 16.7 (just behind Colorado’s Cale Makar at 17.0), and John Carlson is eighth at 16.4.
“I think obviously talent,” says Carlson, asked what makes the group so effective all over the ice. “We've always talked about how well-rounded and talented our [defense] group is, and what they can to the table. And I think it's the other part is how we play. Our style of play, we want guys up the ice, we want guys involved. And when we're in the offensive zone – now more than ever – teams are just collapsing back to the house, so the puck gets up to the [defense] a lot more than it ever has before, I would say. And so there's a lot more chances to make plays, and that's when the talent and ability takes over, and is able to chip in.”
Last season, the offensive contributions were spread around a bit more evenly among the top six, and the Caps had six blueliners reach the 20-point plateau for the first time in franchise history. This season, Carlson and Chychrun have been the primary drivers of the offense from the back end. Carlson, nearing his 36th birthday and about to surpass Nicklas Backstrom (1,105) for the second most games played in franchise history, is off to a terrific start with 13 points (four goals, nine assists) in 16 games.
Carlson’s 57.3 percent Corsi rate at 5-on-5 thus far would be the best of his 17-year NHL career, and his rate of 2.1 points/60 is tied for the third best of his career.
“Our [defense] corps as a whole is a strength of our group,” says Carbery. “We're built from the back end out, and those guys all starting the year off well, and having successful starts this season has been impressive to see. If you look one through eight of the eight defensemen that were carrying, everybody's been in the lineup, number one. But two is the regular top five – [Declan] Chisholm and [Trevor van Riemsdyk] have sort of alternated a little bit – but in those top five guys, we feel like we've got a real quality group of five, and they all bring different things, they all have different sort of skill sets, but are all very, very comfortable now, in our system, in our organization, comfortable with one another, playing with each other.
“And so I think them getting off to a good start and playing at a high level, and their numbers backing that up probably speaks to a lot of that.”
Carry Fourth – Folks in the Washington area know that the Nic Dowd line is essentially the team’s third line in terms of use and deployment, but it always goes fourth in warmup line rushes, so it typically gets tagged as the team’s fourth line. Either way, the Dowd line continues to be effective nearly five years after it was first cobbled together by previous head coach Peter Laviolette.
With Ethen Frank recently added to the dynamic duo of Dowd and Brandon Duhaime, the trio has been playing great hockey on this trip, and they’ve scored the game’s first goal in each of the last two games, doing so largely from making good reads and reacting off one another’s movements and motion in the offensive zone.
“They’re both forecheck plays, and they’re able to get in on a puck and create a stalled puck, and then win that and threaten, so there’s a bunch of different components,” says Carbery of those goals.”
The trio has played 34:57 together this season at 5-on-5, and it has outscored the opposition 3-1 while owning a 5-3 advantage in high danger scoring chances during that time, according to naturalstattrick.com (h/t Caps Today).
And in Tuesday’s game, Duhaime skated a season high 16:40 and blocked a career high seven shots while Dowd logged a season high 17:27 (second among Caps centermen) in the team’s rousing 4-1 win over the Hurricanes.
“I think [Tuesday in Carolina] was – for my money – Brandon Duhaime’s best game of the year, not because of the goal but because of all the other things,” says Carbery.
“How do shot blocks have a correlation to winning a hockey game? We’re on the ropes in two scenarios where they’ve had some [offensive] zone possession, they’re moving around, it’s 30-40 seconds in, and those are shifts where you’re hanging by a thread. And he has two huge shot blocks that go out of play, where if they get a rebound or a second puck, and now they get it back up top again, who knows what happens?
“So, those are massive defensive plays in key moments which he was able to make to bail us out of some vulnerable shifts. And I thought his puck decisions, his reads, the penalty kill – all the things that go into his game – were really, really sharp [Tuesday] night and played a big role in why we came up with two points.”
In The Nets – Logan Thompson starts his third straight game tonight in Florida. According to Sportlogiq, Thompson’s 2.43 goals saved above expected in Tuesday’s game is his second highest figure of the season in 11 starts; his best was a 3.77 GSAE in an Oct. 24 win over the Blue Jackets in Columbus. He has allowed two or fewer goals against in 10 of those 11 starts this season.
Lifetime against Florida, Thompson is 4-1-0 with a 2.81 GAA and a .918 save pct. in five appearances, all starts.
For Florida, ex-Blue Jacket Danill Tarasov starts tonight. On the season, he is 0-3-1 in four starts with a 2.50 GAA and an .891 save pct. In three career starts against the Caps, he is 1-2-0 with a 4.95 GAA and an .833 save pct.
All Lined Up – Here’s how the Capitals and the Panthers might look on Thursday night in Sunrise:
WASHINGTON
Forwards
8-Ovechkin, 17-Strome, 72-Beauvillier
21-Protas, 24-McMichael, 43-Wilson
29-Lapierre, 34-Sourdif, 9-Leonard
22-Duhaime, 26-Dowd, 53-Frank
Defensemen
42-Fehervary, 74-Carlson
6-Chychrun, 3-Roy
38-Sandin, 47-Chisholm
Goaltenders
48-Thompson
79-Lindgren
Healthy Extras
15-Milano
52-McIlrath
57-van Riemsdyk
Injured/Out
80-Dubois (lower body)
FLORIDA
Forwards
27-Luostarinen, 15-Lundell, 63-Marchand
23-Vergaeghe, 17-Rodrigues, 13-Reinhart
70-Boqvist, 9-Bennett, 11-Samoskevich
10-Greer, 79-Schwindt, 71-Kunin
Defensemen
42-Forsling, 5-Ekblad
77-Mikkola, 3-Jones
6-Sebrango, 2-Petry
Goalies
72-Bobrovsky
40-Tarasov
Healthy Extras
18-Gregor
26-Balinskis
Injured/Out
7-Kulikov (upper body)
12-Gadjovich (upper body)
16-Barkov (lower body)
19-Tkachuk (lower body)
92-Nosek (lower body)
