In the midst of the quietest part of the offseason, the Caps attended to some personnel business on Thursday morning when they announced they’ve extended a PTO (professional tryout) invitation to former Washington winger and unrestricted free agent Jakub Vrana for the team’s 2024 training camp next month. The Caps and the 28-year-old Vrana are quite familiar with each other.
Ten summers ago, Vrana was the Caps’ first-round choice (13th overall), the first player drafted during Brian MacLellan’s tenure as general manager. He came up through the Caps’ system, played for AHL Hershey and was part of its 2015-16 Calder Cup finalist team, and he blossomed into a speedy and efficient goal scorer with Washington. When the Caps claimed their first Stanley Cup title in 2018, Vrana was a 22-year-old rookie who supplied some timely top nine scoring. His best two seasons followed, but so did a trade to Detroit in April of 2021, at the trade deadline of the pandemic-abbreviated 2020-21 season.
Sent to Motown in the deal that brought Anthony Mantha to the Capitals, Vrana had a four-goal game against Dallas just 10 days later, but a shoulder injury sustained at training camp three years ago required surgery and shelved him for most of the 2021-22 season. Early in the 2022-23 season, he entered the NHL/NHLPA player assistance program. A stint with AHL Grand Rapids followed, and Vrana was traded to St. Louis in March of 2023.
Last season with the Blues, Vrana was never able to get on track. He had just two goals and six points in 21 games with St. Louis, and he played twice as many games with AHL Springfield, where he totaled 16 goals and 36 points.
Vrana still has the wheels, and he can still shoot and handle the puck. He has played a total of just 83 NHL games since leaving Washington 40 months ago, but he has racked up 34 goals and 52 points while averaging 14:25 per night in ice time. Among all NHL forwards with at least 80 games played over that span, Vrana’s average of 1.46 goals per 60 at 5-on-5 is exceeded only by Toronto’s Auston Matthews (1.76). On the other side of the coin, Vrana hasn’t been a consistent play driver since leaving D.C.; his possession numbers have declined despite favorable zone deployment.
When he got his first look at D.C. area a decade ago, Vrana came to town as the Caps’ big catch in the 2014 NHL Draft. This time around, he arrives seeking to revive a sagging career while the Caps will be aiming to engineer another of the reclamation projects they’ve had success with over the last decade.
With the salary cap squeeze in recent seasons, a number of veteran NHL players have had to settle for the PTO route in an effort to extend their careers in the League. Few of those attempts have met with success; most players are cut loose at the end of camp. In recent autumns, the Caps have notably signed Matt Hendricks (in 2010) and Alex Chiasson (in 2017) on the basis of strong training camps, but the recent success rate around the League isn’t favorable.
With a PTO invite, there are no commitments, no promises and no guarantees from the team, and there’s only a brief window – and likely preciously few preseason opportunities – in which a player can clearly demonstrate that he is more deserving of a roster spot than any number of rivals. The Caps have had an extremely active offseason in which they’ve added a quartet of proven NHL forwards in Pierre-Luc Dubois, Andrew Mangiapane, Taylor Raddysh and Brandon Duhaime, and they’ve also got some young and talented young players knocking at the door of opportunity. The odds are against Vrana; they’re against virtually every player who signs a PTO these days, though the easing of salary cap shackles could pave the way for a higher percentage of them to pan out at this fall’s training camps.
Last September in Boston, the Bruins extended a PTO camp invite to Danton Heinen. A winger the B’s drafted in 2014 and eventually developed as a top nine NHL player, Heinen was traded to Anaheim less than two months before Vrana was dealt to Detroit. After stints with the Ducks and Penguins, Heinen found himself accepting a PTO from his original employer. He made the Bruins’ roster out of camp last fall, and after a 17-goal, 36-point season, he signed a two-year, $4.5 million dollar deal with Vancouver on July 1.
The Caps are in need of goal scoring, and while they have brought in some good options to spark the attack this summer, competition is a good thing. And Vrana can certainly score goals, and he has some runway remaining in what should be the prime seasons of his career. Heinen’s successful PTO saga in Boston is the exception rather than the rule, but as in that case, the team and the player each have a level of familiarity and comfortability with one another.
Vrana and the Caps are looking to replicate what Heinen and the Bruins pulled off last fall. For the Caps, it’s a no risk/high reward proposition. For Vrana, it’s an opportunity for a mid-career reboot under a different coaching staff. But he will have to earn it; the Caps’ depth chart already features as many as eight former first-rounders vying for spots in the top nine, depending on T.J. Oshie’s health status.
Few players remain from Washington’s 2018 Cup team, and the number dwindles every year. Vrana is the first of those players to find his way back to the District as an active player, but whether that return is fleeting or lengthy remains to be seen, and will depend upon Vrana’s performance, his mindset and the state of his game, but also on the performances of the others vying for significant playing time on the power play and/or in the top nine when training camp opens next month.
Few careers play out perfectly, but Vrana is still young enough to forge a thriving and redemptive exclamation to whatever lies ahead for him. Washington is where it all started for him, where he first experienced NHL success, and where he was a valued part of a championship team. And if he can’t crack the Caps’ opening night roster, Vrana may still be able to open eyes elsewhere around the League with a strong camp performance next month.
