One Day – On Saturday night in St. Louis, the Caps were halfway – or more – to Denver, their next road destination. But rather than continue out west, Washington had to head back home first, for the exclusive purpose of hosting the Toronto Maple Leafs in tonight’s one-game homestand.
Tomorrow, Washington takes to the road for a three-game trip; the Caps have played a grand total of just five road games to this point of the campaign, the fewest of any team in the League to date.
The Leafs just finished a four-game homestand with a 3-0 loss to Ottawa on Tuesday night. After finishing up their set of back-to-backs in Washington tonight, they’ll head back to the north lands where they’ll spend the next week, playing three more home games. Toronto doesn’t go on the road again until Nov. 27.
Tiger In Your Tank – The news in Caps Land today was dominated by the news that broke around dinner time on Tuesday, of Washington’s deal with the Penguins – believed to be the first between the two Metro Division rivals since 2012 – that brought popular center Lars Eller back to Washington.
Eller is en route to the District and won’t play tonight, but he is expected to address the local media at one of the intermissions of tonight’s game. In the meantime, Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery and a couple of Eller’s former and new teammates talked about the move.
“I think that's a better question for management,” begins Carbery, “but for us acquiring Lars, with where we're at as a team, I think the developments and what's transpired with Conor McMichael playing the left wing has changed the scenario a little bit for us at the center position. And so Lars becoming available, and being able to add to our depth down the middle of the ice becomes a big add for our team. And being able to have Lars in the fold – the position aside and what he can do on the ice, but the familiarity with the organization, with the players in our locker room, and knowing that the person, the player – would be a good fit for our group.”
On the ice, Eller brings 1,053 games and 16 seasons of NHL experience as a middle six center who can kill penalties, is good on the face-off dot, and can also play higher in the lineup for short periods of time when needed. In Pittsburgh, Eller was playing over 16 minutes a night and centering the team’s second line. His role is likely to be smaller upon returning to Washington a bit more than 20 months after he was dealt away on March 1, 2023 to the Colorado Avalanche.
“I watched some of his [video] from the season, and he’s been solid,” says Carbery of the 35-year-old pivot. “I think overall he’s like 56 percent on draws, so he gives us a left shot, penalty kill draws. We’ve obviously got Nic Dowd on the right side, but now Lars can potentially take some of those left shot draws away.
“I think he’s been a very consistent player, even since he’s moved on and his time in Colorado and Pittsburgh. You know exactly what you’re going to get with Lars Eller.”
Eller’s reputation is more as a defensive specialist, a guy that can play against other teams’ top lines and kill penalties. But during Washington’s 2018 run to the Stanley Cup, Eller was an offensive force, too. He tied for fourth on the team with seven goals, and his 18 points ranked sixth. Eller scored the double-overtime goal in Game 3 of the first round that got the Caps off life support after they lost the first two games of that series with Columbus, and he most notably netting the Stanley Cup-clinching goal at 12:23 of the third period of Game 5 against the Golden Knights in Vegas, snapping a 3-3 tie and bringing Washington its first Stanley Cup title. Eller scored in all four series, he had a multiple-point game in all four series, including a trio of three-point games in the 2018 playoffs.
Washington’s top two lines have been humming all season, and the Dowd trio has played well, as it typically does regardless of who is playing on the wing. But the Caps’ “third line” of Sonny Milano/Jakub Vrana on the left, Hendrix Lapierre/Mike Sgarbossa in the middle and Andre Mangiapane on the right, hasn’t been able to forge a clear identity yet, as the other three have. And Eller does have some familiarity with Vrana, having played with him during his first tour of duty in the District.
“Honestly, I was rotating here,” remembers Vrana. “I was with [Evgeny Kuznetsov and Nicklas Backstrom], but mostly with Lars, actually. I’m really excited for him coming here; I was texting with him last night. I’m pumped to see him.
“When you play with someone for a certain time, you guys start to click together as you get to know each other more on the ice. He’s been a solid two-way centerman for a long time, and we’ll see how it looks when he comes here. But I would love to play with him again.”
Adding reasonably priced and well-established talent at one of the game’s most important positions is also a positive for the Caps, whose hot start may have helped provide some impetus for this move.
“He’s a good player,” says Dowd. “He’s good on the face-off dot and he works hard. He is definitely going to add good depth to our group. And he has been here before, so he is going to be comfortable.
“We’re obviously excited to add a veteran player; he has a thousand and some games. He knows how to play in big time situations, he knows the amount of work that it takes to win. Winning is really, really hard; it’s not easy to do. It’s not even easy to score a goal in this League, and guys that have played over a thousand games understand that.”
Lapierre is going to be a good player in this League, as he was for the final third of last season. He is off to a slow start in 2024-25, but he is a talented and coachable player with a hunger and a drive to get better. Lapierre can benefit from being around Eller, just as he benefits from being around Dowd, Dylan Strome and P-L Dubois on a daily basis.
“It's sometimes hard,” admits Carbery, “because as an organization, as a team, [hockey operations] is always trying to look for ways to improve our team, whether that's with more young players and draft picks, or whether that's with someone that they believe can help us win more hockey games right now. And so if that affects Lappy’s playing time or opportunities, certainly that's not an easy thing or something that he wants to see or hear.
“But at the end of the day, for Lappy, he's focused on his development to become a great NHL player. And whether that's him getting a little less playing time, changing the role, it doesn't change my plan or our plan for him. And quite frankly, once he comes to grips with another center man being in the organization – and maybe there's an injury, and it doesn't affect his playing time – it shouldn't change his focus and what he's trying to do on a daily basis. Whether he's playing 18 minutes a night in his third year, or it takes him a little bit longer, everybody's development plan is different, and everybody's development curve is different.
“So for us, we're just trying to help Lappy become the absolute best NHL player he could possibly be, and we know he's a big part of our future and our organization moving forward.
In The Nets – For the first time this season, the Caps will start the same goaltender in consecutive contests, and that goaltender is Logan Thompson. Thompson helped the Caps to an 8-1 win in St. Louis on Saturday. The score of that game is somewhat deceptive; Washington scored five goals in the third period of that game, but it was tight early, and the Caps needed Thompson to come up with some big stops in the game’s first 40 minutes.
Thompson has come up with key saves all season long, as has his netminding mate, Charlie Lindgren. Supported by an otherworldly 5.53 goals per game in offensive support, Thompson has won each of his first seven starts with the Capitals this season, becoming the first goaltender in franchise history to be able to make that claim.
Carbery noted this morning that the team – as is typical – has mapped out its goaltending plan going forward a bit, certainly through the looming three-game road trip. Asked about the decision process for determining that schedule and whether much attention is paid to a goaltender’s prior record against a given opponent, Carbery answered thusly:
“It's good question. I challenge our goaltender coach – Scott Murray – a lot on that, of how guys have done against guys in the past. And I will be honest with you, we do look at that and look at their breakdowns and their splits. And Logan has had a ton of experience against Western teams, and we're going out to play some Western teams, so we've looked at that.
“[Scotty] downplays it, so I put my trust in him as a goalie coach. Each situation is different; each team or game approach is different. But we do look at it. It is something that I think you'd be foolish not to at least pay attention to and take a peek at, and say, ‘Hey, does this alter our decision on what way we go with who’s playing in net?”
Some in the media scrum are of the belief that the Caps were resetting their rotation to give Thompson another shot at his former team, Vegas, where Washington plays on Sunday in the middle match of its three-game road trip. That may be true, this move might have also been made with an eye toward tonight’s tilt.
Lifetime against the Leafs, Thompson is 2-1-0 with a 2.89 GAA and an .895 save pct. in three appearances (two starts). On the other hand, Lindgren is 2-5-0 with a 4.40 GAA and an .887 save pct. in eight appearances (seven starts).
Drilling down just a bit deeper, we see that only one member of the current Leafs’ team has scored more than once against Thompson, and that’s center Max Domi, who has two goals on 10 shots in his career against Thompson. William Nylander (four), and John Tavares and Bobby McMann (two each) have solved Lindgren multiple times.
Anthony Stolarz had the net for the Leafs last night against Ottawa, and perhaps the Leafs were saving Joseph Woll for Washington. Woll gets the net in the District tonight, seeking to improve upon his perfect 3-0-0 career mark against the Capitals with a 1.67 GAA and a .940 save pct. in three appearances, all starts.
All Lined Up – Here’s how we believe the Capitals and Maple Leafs might look when they take the ice on Wednesday night in Washington:
WASHINGTON
Forwards
8-Ovechkin 17-Strome, 21-Protas
24-McMichael, 80-Dubois, 43-Wilson
13-Vrana, 29-Lapierre, 88-Mangiapane
22-Duhaime, 26-Dowd, 16-Raddysh
Defensemen
6-Chychrun, 74-Carlson
38-Sandin, 3-Roy
42-Fehervary, 57-van Riemsdyk
Goaltenders
48-Thompson
79-Lindgren
Extras
20-Eller
27-Alexeyev
52-McIlrath
Out/Injured
15-Milano (upper body)
19-Backstrom (hip)
77-Oshie (back)
TORONTO
Forwards
23-Kniess, 11-Domi, 16-Marner
74-McMann, 91-Tavares, 88-Nylander
24-Dewar, 29-Holmberg, 89-Robertson
18-Lorentz, 64-Kampf, 75-Reaves
Defensemen
44-Rielly, 95-Ekman-Larsson
22-McCabe, 8-Tanev
2-Benoit, 25-Timmins
Goaltenders
60-Woll
41-Stolarz
Extras
46-Steeves
51-Myers
Out/Injured
19-Jarnkrok (lower body)
28-Hakanpaa (knee)
34-Matthews (upper body)
36-Mermis (jaw)
67-Pacioretty (lower body)
