Season Of The Shark – It’s too late in the calendar for Shark Week, but today is Shark Sunday in D.C., with the San Jose Sharks in town to supply the for opposition game two of the Capitals’ five-game homestand. The Caps are seeking to stretch their modest running run to three games, and they’re also seeking their first set of consecutive wins at Capital One Arena in calendar 2023.
Washington winger Sonny Milano is under the weather; he missed Saturday’s practice and is still ailing into Sunday, so the Caps put out an early morning call to AHL Hershey for Hendrix Lapierre, who will step into the lineup in Milano’s absence this afternoon. Lapierre saw six games worth of NHL action at the outset of the 2021-22 season, memorably scoring his first NHL goal in his first NHL game on Oct. 13, 2021 against the New York Rangers.
With Hershey this season, Lapierre has three assists in six games.
“Hendrix will go in the lineup tonight,” says Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery. “Sonny’s still not there yet. [Lapierre] will play fourth line center, and we’ll see how it goes from there, depending on game flow and how it works.”
Carbery noted that Lapierre has been playing in all situations in Hershey, playing at 5-on-5 as well as both special teams.
Against a Sharks team that is concluding a five-game road trip today while still seeking its first win of the season, the Caps know they can’t take the opposition lightly. The Caps themselves are trying to piece together consecutive wins on home ice for the first time since last December.
“I know we have a mature group that understands that going into this game, there is not a team that we should be taking lightly,” says Carbery. “And number two is, I guarantee you that group over there believes they can beat the Washington Capitals, and they’re right.
“So it’s important that we’re playing a mature game in these situations, from our compete level to our energy levels to our attention to detail – and that all of that is at its highest level this afternoon.”
Turn Back Time – Early season stats can be heavily inflated or deflated, and they can lose meaning because of the lack of sample size. But when a team – such as Washington this season – undergoes a significant overhaul of its coaching staff, one stat that can be revealing early on is ice time. Coaches that are new to the organization haven’t seen players up close as much or for as long as previous regimes, and certain players’ skills sets may be seen more or less favorably, depending upon how a coach wants or plans for his team to play.
Like other stats, ice time stats will be more valuable and will hold more meaning later in the season, but one thing that’s interesting to me in the early going is the deployment of defenseman John Carlson. Now in his 15th NHL season and just 66 games shy of 1,000 for his NHL career, Carlson has been a workhorse for the entirety of his NHL career, averaging just under 23 and a half minutes per night over the course of his career. His single-season career high of 25:04 per game came in 2018-19, his age 29 season, and one in which he finished fourth in the balloting for the Norris Trophy.
Through the first seven games of this season, Carlson has been one of the team’s best and most consistent performers, and that’s reflected in his average ice time of 25:34, the highest of his career and the fourth highest in the NHL this season, behind Drew Doughty (26:14) of the Kings, Travis Sanheim (25:59) of the Flyers, and Seth Jones (25:37) of the Blackhawks.
Last season, Carlson averaged 23:23 per night, leading the team and ranking 28th among all NHL defensemen. Alex Alexeyev was Washington’s sixth defenseman at the end of last season, and he finished with an average of 16:27 per game in ice time, so there was a spread of about seven minutes between the first and sixth blueliner on the Caps’ depth chart at season’s end.
This season, that figure is a much more pronounced 15 minutes, with Alexeyev – the most frequently deployed of the three players who’ve seen time as Washington’s sixth blueliner in 2023-24 – sitting at 10:34 for the season to date. Alexeyev has played four of the first seven games.
The X factor in this discussion is Joel Edmundson, the veteran defenseman the Caps obtained in a July 1 trade with Montreal. Edmundson suffered a hand injury early in training camp, and was later placed on long term injured reserve, keeping him out of the Washington lineup for the team’s first 10 games/24 days, a period that is nearing an end.
If Edmundson had been healthy and in the lineup, it seems highly likely that he’d be averaging more than 10 and a half minutes per night right now, and Carlson’s own figure might also be a couple minutes lower.
“It sort of goes to a little bit of game flow, because these games are so tight right now,” says Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery. “And it goes to a little bit of the urgency level of our group. If we’re rolling out of the gate, then we’re not having to lean on veteran guys like John Carlson this early, and the same thing with [Evgeny Kuznetsov], and those minutes are spread out.
“We, as a staff – and there’s a little bit of give and take here, because you’re trying to set young players up for success down the road, so you’ve got to be careful about limiting minutes and confidence levels and all that stuff – but we feel like the priority got to a point where we’ve got to get this thing going. We’ve got to get going here. We were 1-3-1 or whatever it was record-wise, but even just the way we were playing, it was like, ‘Okay, we’re going to have to lean a little bit heavier right now on our veteran guys to be able to get some positive momentum, to get our season [going] and to get us feeling good about ourselves as a group. And then we can assess from there and bring the minutes back.”
Like Carlson, Kuznetsov (21:26) has an average ice time figure that’s the highest of his career to date, and that’s also true for Dylan Strome (17:30) and Trevor van Riemsdyk (20:08), though not to the degree of Carlson and Kuznetsov.
The 33-year-old Carlson saw his five-game point streak end in Friday’s game against Minnesota, but he won the game for Washington in the shootout; Carlson was the only one of 14 shooters (seven for each side) to find the back of the net. A season after he missed three months of action because of a gnarly head injury, Carlson is handling the increased workload with aplomb.
“I think some of it is game situations, too,” says Carlson. “I think there’s probably been a lot more power play and penalty kill time, and we’ve been chasing some games, too, because we haven’t gotten out to a great start [in them]. All of those things bleed into it.
“But I feel great. I don’t really think about it. I see it and I try to decipher how good or bad I feel or how I played, I do that stuff, but I’m just enjoying playing. It’s been fun.”
In The Nets – Darcy Kuemper stopped 39 of 41 shots against Minnesota on Friday night, and he stopped all seven shots he faced in the shootout to claim his second win of the season. He gets the net again on Sunday against San Jose, starting for the sixth time in Washington’s eight games this season.
The estimable Carter Myers came up with this splendid nugget relating to Kuemper’s Friday night performance against the Wild: Kuemper stopped all seven Wild shootout attempts on Friday, the most by a Caps goalie without a shootout goal since Olie Kolzig foiled all 12 Edmonton shootout chances in a Jan. 17, 2008 game, a 5-4 shootout win in the District. Matt Bradley won that game for the Caps in the 12th round.
Lifetime against San Jose, Kuemper is 8-4-4 with a shutout, a 2.84 GAA and a .906 save pct in 18 appearances (17 starts).
For the Sharks, we are expecting to see Mackenzie Blackwood between the pipes today. Lifetime against Washington, Blackwood is 2-8-1 with a 3.57 GAA and an .859 save pct. in a dozen appearances, all starts.
All Lined Up – Here is how we believe the Capitals and Sharks might look when they take the ice in the District on Sunday afternoon:
WASHINGTON
Forwards
8-Ovechkin, 17-Strome, 43-Wilson
45-Phillips, 92-Kuznetsov, 77-Oshie
24-McMichael, 19-Backstrom, 39-Mantha
47-Malenstyn, 29-Lapierre, 21-Protas
Defensemen
42-Fehervary, 74-Carlson
38-Sandin, 57-van Riemsdyk
27-Alexeyev, 3-Jensen
Goaltenders
35-Kuemper
79-Lindgren
Injured
6-Edmundson (hand)
15-Milano (illness)
26-Dowd (upper body)
67-Pacioretty (torn Achilles’ tendon)
Scratches
4-Häman Aktell
46-Johansen
SAN JOSE
Forwards
10-Duclair, 48-Hertl, 20-Zetterlund
72-Eklund, 7-Sturm, 11-Kunin
18-Zadina, 40-Peterson, 68-Hoffman
54-Smith, 22-Carpenter, 62-Labanc
Defensemen
38-Ferraro, 6-Emberson
44-Vlasic, 4-Burroughs
71-Knyzhov, 84-Rutta
Goaltenders
29-Blackwood
36-Kahkonen
Injured
5-Benning (lower body)
9-MacDonald (undisclosed)
39-Couture (lower body)
64-Granlund (lower body)
94-Barabanov (upper body)
Scratches
17-Bordeleau
83-Okhotiuk
