Caps Visit Habs
Caps take quick trip north of border for lone game in Montreal this season
The Caps take to the road on Thursday night for their penultimate road game of the 2022-23 season, the team's lone visit to Montreal to take on the Canadiens. The Caps conclude the road portion of their schedule next Tuesday when they visit the Bruins in Boston on the back half of a set of back-to-back games.
Thursday's game has no meaning in the standings for either club; the Canadiens have been outside the playoff cutline for most of the season, they've been mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, and they're in the midst of a publicly acknowledged rebuild.
Washington's streak of eight straight postseason berths - the second longest active streak of its kind - ended when it was mathematically eliminated on Tuesday night. Derailed by a spate of injuries from which it ultimately could not recover, Washington's season took a sharp turn in a southerly direction around the turn of the calendar, soon after top defenseman John Carlson was lost for three months because of a fractured skull.
After piling up 50 points in their first 41 games, a revolving door crew has managed to accumulate just 27 points over 36 games since, the worst points percentage (.375) in the League over that span. Washington has amassed 410 man-games lost to injury or illness this season, its highest total in nearly a quarter of a century.
Those injuries took down many of the team's best and highest paid players, and there were many nights on which a Washington team took the ice missing tens of millions of dollars' worth of talent. In the 13 full seasons in which Alex Ovechkin, Nicklas Backstrom and John Carlson - the team's three longest-tenured and highest paid players - the 2022-23 season is by far the one with the lowest "attendance rate" for those three players.
The trio of Ovechkin, Backstrom and Carlson has played a combined total of only 60 percent of the team's total man games to this point of the season, with Backstrom and Carlson each essentially missing half of the campaign. Prior to this season, the lowest attendance rates for the three players was 82.1 percent, and that figure was achieved twice, in 2011-12 when the Caps snuck into the playoffs as the seventh seed with 92 points and again in 2021-22 when they were the eighth seed in the Eastern Conference with 100 points.
It's a far cry from the Stanley Cup championship season of 2017-18 when Backstrom missed a single game and Ovechkin and Carlson both played all 82. From 2012-13 through 2019-20, the three were collectively at 95.7% or better for seven of the eight seasons. In Laviolette's three seasons in Washington, the trio has gone from 90.5% to 82.1% to 60 percent in terms of availability. This season, the Caps didn't have each of those three players on the ice and in uniform for the same game until March 23, their 73rd game of the season.
Washington's man-games lost total has climbed in each of those seasons, going from 72 (in 56 games) in '20-21 to 288 last season, and to 410 - and counting - this season. Unsurprisingly, the Caps' points percentage has declined as its total of man games lost has climbed.
"That's what happened," says Laviolette of the injuries and the man-games lost. "There's nothing that anybody can do about that. The only thing that we can control is how hard we compete today in practice, and to be prepared for the games, and do our best to win hockey games.
"And when it comes down to it, we didn't do it well enough. That to me is when you start looking for reasons on why things didn't happen, then you're just looking to make an excuse. We're going into this game [Thursday], and we're putting a good team on the ice. We're expecting to win that game, we need to win that game. That's what we're going there to do. So it's on us. It's on that group that moves forward. We've got to go and get ourselves a win."
That group that moves forward will not include right wing T.J. Oshie or Trevor van Riemsdyk, neither of whom will make the trip to Montreal. Both players missed the Caps' previous game against the Rangers on Sunday afternoon in Washington, and both are out with upper body ailments. Oshie is a goal shy of registering his seventh 20-goal season in the NHL, and five of his previous six 20-goal campaigns have come since he joined the Capitals in 2015-16.
Since its improbable run to the Stanley Cup Final following the pandemic-abbreviated 2020-21 season, Montreal has played to a combined .378 points percentage, lowest in the NHL over that span. That has resulted in consecutive playoff misses for the Habs, a rarity for the local followers.
Over the course of the fabled history of the League's most successful franchise, only twice have the Habs ever missed the playoffs in three straight seasons: the first time was from 1919-20 through 1921-22, and the second was from 1998-99 through 2000-01.
