By any measure, the Washington Capitals’ 50th anniversary season of 2024-25 was a smashing success. The Caps surprised the hockey world, sitting atop the NHL standings for patches of the season before finishing with 51 victories and 111 points, a 20-point increase from last season’s mark.
In his 20th season, captain Alex Ovechkin scored a remarkable 44 goals to climb past Wayne Gretzky (894) for the most goals in NHL history. Ovechkin, who turns 40 in September, missed 16 games with a broken leg, but still scored at a rate previously unseen for anyone his age or older. He didn’t go more than three games without a goal all season, finally passing Gretzky in an April 6 game on Long Island.
As the chase gathered steam, Ovechkin got even hotter, scoring 11 goals in his last 15 games. During that finishing kick, the Gr8 Eight didn’t go more than a game (in which he played) without scoring a goal. The ongoing chase and the reverence his teammates showed their captain, the reverence and respect that Ovechkin and Gretzky displayed for the game, and the adoration shown for one of the game’s all-time greats in the buildings around the League will stay with them and with us for a long time.
As the Caps celebrated their golden jubilee season, they also celebrated John Carlson’s 700th career point (registered on Jan. 6 in Buffalo and honored on Feb. 9 in DC). And as the season wore on, they celebrated each other and their ongoing achievements and accomplishments; over the 82-game regular season, virtually every regular player managed a significant single-season best achievement and/or visibly and notably showed improvement in an important aspect of their respective games, leading to unforeseen team success.
Now, the celebration they’re eyeing is the one that lasts an entire year. That’s the winning of the Stanley Cup, the holy grail, the crowning achievement. A couple dozen Capitals, give or take, are aiming to combine their closeness and their respective skill sets in pursuit of what’s driven them their whole lives, a silver cup that takes two months and 16 wins – and oh, so much more – to win.
“Everything you do as a player goes into wanting to have success in the postseason,” says Caps right wing Tom Wilson. “The regular season is great, but it doesn’t really matter. As an individual and as a player, you grow up dreaming about playing in the Stanley Cup playoffs. It doesn’t matter what season it is, it’s hard to win. But I can guarantee you that when we get here, we want to win.
“And you’ve got to show up, you’ve got to play the games, and you’ve got to execute; that’s the hard part, a lot of ups and downs. But there’s no lack of motivation here. We want to win, and we want to play as hard as we can. I think that’s a given for most guys playing in the playoffs. It’s a special time of year, and you can never take it for granted. You’ve got to keep pushing forward.”
The 2024-25 Capitals have pushed forward from training camp to this point with only a few speed bumps, some of them recent.
Beginning at last September’s training camp, the Caps seamlessly integrated seven new players into their mix both on and off the ice. The combination of those seven newcomers, the remaining core of the team’s 2018 Stanley Cup team, some veteran stalwarts acquired from elsewhere before last summer, and a group of emerging young talents hitting their strides at the same time resulted in a unique, diverse and fun-loving brotherhood that genuinely enjoys being in each other's orbit, as well as competing with and for each other.
In a 13-day span late last June and early July, the Caps remade their hockey team with a swift and methodical acquisition of seven players: goaltender Logan Thompson, defensemen Jakob Chychrun and Matt Roy, and forwards P-L Dubois, Brandon Duhaime, Andrew Mangiapane, and Taylor Raddysh. This flurry of transactions was set off in the days leading up to and following the 2024 NHL Draft in Vegas.
And days after the dust had settled and their summer development camp concluded, the Caps announced the appointment of Chris Patrick to senior vice president and general manager. As a longtime member of the Caps’ hockey operations department who has held a variety of different posts with various responsibilities over the years, and one who played a role in the construction of the 2018 Caps Stanley Cup championship team, Patrick has had some skin in the game for two decades, but his Caps fandom is rooted in his childhood.
Patrick has seen what we’ve seen; he’s celebrated and agonized over the same events and occurrences as the rest of us. And he was highly invested – and ultimately quite pleased – with how the season played out.
“Realistically,” begins Patrick, “my hopes and expectations coming into the season were that we’d compete for a playoff spot, either in that top three in the division or a wild card spot. But probably realistically, I felt like we were going to be battling it out for maybe that number three spot in our division. And obviously, you could tell right away that maybe those expectations were a little low based on how the team was playing.
“I thought in October and November, our team was playing so good; they were going out and controlling games for large stretches of the game and really dominating play. And from there you see we’ve got what looks like a pretty good thing going here, and you change expectation levels from there.”
The Caps got off to a 7-2-0 October start, and it wasn’t until their first two games after Ovechkin’s injury – on Nov. 18 in Utah – that they lost consecutive games for the first time. Washington didn’t trail by as many as four goals in any game until April, in game 75. In their first 58 games, they lost by three goals only twice. Virtually every night of the season, they banded together and found a way to be competitive – and usually pull a point or two – from whatever type of game presented itself.
And now, Ovechkin and the 2018 Cup holdovers, and the seven newcomers, and the in-betweeners like Nic Dowd, Trevor van Riemsdyk, Dylan Strome and Charlie Lindgren, and the emerging young talents like Connor McMichael, Aliaksei Protas and Rasmus Sandin will all put the season behind them and set their collective sights on those 16 victories, all while 15 other teams around the League do the exact same thing.
Beginning on Monday at Capital One Arena, the Caps will clash with the Montreal Canadiens in best-of-seven, first-round Stanley Cup playoff series.
“We had a great regular season, did a lot of good things over six months,” says Caps coach Spencer Carbery. “And now, that doesn’t mean a thing. And the guys know that and understand that it’s a brand-new year, brand-new season, playing against a real good hockey team that’s had a great finish to their season, [that] since the 4 Nations break has played real well, has found their way to the playoffs and has a ton of momentum. We’re excited to get going in the playoffs.”
They’ll start by facing an upstart Montreal squad that still retains six players from its most recent trip to the playoffs in 2021 – when the Habs advanced to the Stanley Cup final before bowing to Tampa Bay – but has also stacked up a bevy of dynamic young offensive talents since.
Montreal’s top line of Cole Caufield, Nick Suzuki and Juraj Slafkovsky combined for 85 goals this season, and rookie defenseman Lane Hutson – older brother of Caps blueline prospect Cole Hutson – piled up 60 assists to tie a longstanding record for rookie NHL defensemen. Former Caps rearguard Larry Murphy set that record in his 19-year-old rookie in 1980-81, and Hutson matched it in his 20-year-old season – he turned 21 in February – four and a half decades later.
Despite generating less than half (48.13 percent, according to naturalstattrick.com) of the high danger scoring chances while they’re on the ice together at 5-on-5 this season, the Suzuki line has outscored the opposition by a combined 50-29 in almost 706 minutes together.
And in the 274 minutes and 7 seconds that trio has played along with Hutson, the Habs have outscored the opposition by 26-11 while generating 54.78 percent of all high danger scoring chances.
“When Hutson's out with that top line – and they try to do that a lot, whether Hutson's with [Kaiden] Guhle or one of the other guys – I think they try to break guys down 1-on-1, and then look for that extra pass,” says van Riemsdyk. “It’s about trying to get teams to suck that second guy in, and then they're all capable of making high-end plays, and they're all pretty high-end shooters.
“Slafkovsky’s got a heavy shot. Obviously, Caufield is elite, and Suzuki is really good, too. So I think they try to break you down 1-on-1, bring that second guy, and then hopefully that opens up a third. So, we’ve got to do a good job of helping, but also in being aware of what the most dangerous play is.”
It’s no coincidence those four players are Montreal’s four leading scorers. And although the Habs boast four 20-goal scorers to Washington’s seven, the Habs do have a dozen players with double-digit goal totals this season, so they’ve got some depth. But the Caps know they’ll need to pay special attention to the Suzuki trio.
“You don't want to let Suzuki and Caufield and those guys hang onto pucks and make plays against us,” says McMichael. “They’ve got a really elite line there with Suzuki, who can obviously put the puck in the net, but he's a high-end playmaker. And obviously Caufield is a pure sniper, so they don't need much opportunity to find the back of the net, as they've proven throughout the year. And for us against them, it’s about keeping the puck out of their hands as much as possible and not letting them transition too easily.”
The Caps have an advantage over Montreal in blueline experience. Washington’s likely six defensemen for Game 1 have combined for 3,139 games played to 2,158 for Montreal. And three of Montreal’s expected top six have yet to reach the 200-game plateau in the NHL.
Although the Habs controlled only 47.48 of shot attempts at 5-on-5 this season, ranking 28th in the League, lowest among the 16 playoff entrants, Montreal finished second in the NHL with 1,424 blocked shots.
In addition to keeping the Canadiens’ top line as quiet as possible offensively, the Caps will be seeking to establish an offensive zone presence of their own against Montreal. Given the Habs’ propensity for blocking shots, they’ll need to be judicious with their shot selection and puck decisions.
“It’s not a secret that the teams with the best puck possession set themselves up for success,” says Dubois. “I don’t think we’ve been the heaviest shot team this season; there are teams that shoot the puck the moment they cross the blueline, and I don’t think that’s been us, necessarily.
“You can look at any stat out there; if you have the puck in their zone for 23 seconds or more, your chances of scoring a goal go up. You can go back and forth all day with the numbers, but at the end of the day, you don’t have to play defense if you have the puck. And if you spend it in their zone, and you keep getting good changes, you can just go back in and keep going back and back and back.”
“I think it's all about sustaining pressure,” says Dowd. “Not only are you going to get those first, second, third, fourth opportunities, where you're going to score against most NHL goalies in 82 games of the season, but even more so in playoffs, when it's going to be so hard to get those first golden look opportunities.
“It’s going to be a lot of pucks from the point, shots from exterior that lead to the interior, and the second, third and fourth opportunities, and that's where we're going to score. And then saying that, if we do a good job breaking out and possess the puck in the neutral zone, and then in the offensive zone, we are not only going to create those chances, but we're also going to have the puck, which eliminates a lot of their high end players from having the puck and having an ability to create.”
Of the seven players the Caps acquired early last summer, Dubois arrived with term (seven years) in a trade, and Roy (six years) and Duhaime (two years) got term as unrestricted free agents. Ovec the last three months, the Caps have extended Thompson (six years) and Chychrun (eight years), so those 2024 summer additions will have a lasting impact on the team.
“One, credit to each player for coming in and understanding their situation and that they're on an expiring contract and really taking the opportunity and running with it, and really making it a no-brainer to try to get something done as soon as we're good with all of them,” says Patrick. “And as I’ve said in the past, it’s a big testament to our group as well, just getting these guys acclimated and comfortable right away. Look at Jakob Chychrun; you don't score 20 goals as a defenseman having a slow start, so the fact that he can feel comfortable right away in game one to play his game, I think that's a huge testament to our group and to our coaching staff, and it's just been really fun to watch.
“And I've had a lot of people tell me how much it seems like this group likes being around each other and likes playing for each other. So from a management side, you love hearing that stuff, because that's so much of what we do, we're trying to get that feel with the team. We're trying to get a team that understands each other, gets each other, likes being around each other, likes playing hard for each other. So when you hear that stuff, it really makes you feel like you've done what you’re trying to do.”
What they’re trying to do now is win, because that’s what Ovechkin has wanted all along. He didn’t want to chase Gretzky’s record on a mediocre team, he wanted a chance to play in the postseason, a chance to win another Cup.
And Ovechkin is well aware of the impact those seven first-year Caps have had on the team on and off the ice this season.
“I think the chemistry – what’s in this room – we built since day one, an obviously with some new faces on the team,” says Ovechkin. “But it seems like everybody feels welcome, everybody understands it’s a special group. And there’s ups and downs, and we always support each other, and we’re always on the same page.”
“He’s a motivated guy,” says Wilson of Ovechkin. “I’ve said it since day one; he is one of the hungriest hockey players I’ve ever been around. And whether it’s scoring goals or whether it’s hunting for another Cup, you can see that he really wants it.
“I went to his birthday dinner in September at the beginning of the year, and he was talking not about the record, but he was talking about having a good crack at the Cup and making it to the playoffs, and getting the team there. Obviously, along the way, there was a lot of cool stuff that happened. But the whole year, he’s been talking about the most important thing being winning, and we feel that in this room. And he drives the bus for us.”
Since winning the Cup seven springs ago, the Caps have been in a postseason rut, failing to win even a series. Can this season’s special blend of team chemistry alter that course in the spring of 2025?
“Every team and every run is unique,” says van Riemsdyk, a Stanley Cup winner with Chicago in 2015. “Obviously, we’ve got a bunch of new faces who have done really well this year, and that is a huge thing. You’ve got a bunch of new guys who haven't been here for our first-round exits, so maybe they don't feel that pressure at all, so it's good.
“But I think our group knows how tough it is to win in the playoffs, and obviously first-round exits are disappointing, but to be in the playoffs and give yourself a chance is what it's all about. And you want to play the right way and do the right things. Sometimes it’s a bounce here or there that determines a series, but you want to do the right things that will put you in the right spot to get those bounces.”
The last team to nail down a playoff berth last season in Carbery’s first season as an NHL bench boss, Washington was the first team to punch its ticket this season. The Caps clinched their playoff berth on March 20, with 13 games remaining in the season.
Washington wobbled a bit over those last 13 games, posting a 5-7-1 mark, and it suffered some injuries after what had previously been a remarkably healthy season, aside from Ovechkin’s broken wheel.
Thompson went down with an upper body injury on April 2, and Protas was sidelined with a lower body injury two nights later. And after playing each of the team’s first 81 games this season, blueliner Martin Fehervary couldn’t answer the bell for game 82 and has not been on the ice with his teammates since.
“You never want to have injuries right before the playoffs, obviously,” says Patrick, speaking before the Fehervary absence. “I’m hopeful that with [Thompson] and Pro that they’ll both be back sooner than later, and that will be a big boost for the team.
“And that’s why it’s the hardest trophy to win. It’s just part of the adversity you have to deal with. The year we won the Cup, Nick Backstrom missed games, Andre Burakovsky missed games, Tom Wilson missed games, and you just had to deal with it and move on. And I think we have a resilient group, and it’s a tight group and they’ll battle for each other, and it will be a next man up mentality, and I’m confident that the group will rise to the occasion.”
The group has consistently risen to the occasion this season. Starting Monday, they’ll embark upon a journey they hope will be long and prosperous, like the season that preceded it.
“The expectations of the playoffs are you never know what to expect,” says Patrick. “Everybody that's in there deserves to be there, and any team can beat any team on a given night. I think we just have to make sure we're not – and I don't think we are – but we have to make sure we're not content with what we've done.
“It is starting fresh now, and I think we need to go out there and prove ourselves again, like we did at the beginning of the season, that, ‘Hey, we're, we're a good team of this league. We belong here.’ And we need to be really trying to play that dominating style of hockey.”
Dominating in the playoffs is difficult, but the Caps do not lack confidence.
“Last year, it took a lot out of us just to get into the playoffs,” says Strome. “Obviously we went in as pretty heavy underdogs, and we believed in each other in the room. We played [the Rangers] pretty tight in most of the games, but we couldn’t get over that hump to get our first win.
“I feel like this year, we obviously feel confident. We’ve played well against most teams in the League throughout the season and we have the confidence that we can beat anyone, and that’s a good thing to have.”
“We’ve had a lot of fun this year; this group is pretty special,” says Dubois. “This series is something we’ve been waiting for a long time; we’ve had it in the back of our minds as soon as we clinched the Metro [Division] and then the East; everybody was starting to think more and more about this. It’s the most fun part of the season, and we’re going to be ready for it.”
It will be hard to top the majestic or the magnificence of the celebration of Ovechkin’s Halley’s Comet achievement on Long Island two weekends ago, but the Stanley Cup is awarded annually in June. What better way to wrap up an already memorable 50th anniversary season than with a celebration and a banner raising to go along with everything they’ve celebrated already this season?
“After that game in Long Island, it had the feel of celebrating a major milestone for the team,” says Patrick. “Hopefully the guys are saying, ‘Let's get that feeling again. Let's get it pretty soon here, and let's not wait for another 895 goals.’”
