Spencer For Hire

Forty-nine years ago Wednesday, the Caps announced Jimmy Anderson as the team's first ever head coach ahead of its ill-fated inaugural season of 1974-75. A year and a day shy of half a century later, the Capitals announced on Tuesday the hiring of Spencer Carbery as the 20th head coach in the franchise's history.

Although this is his first opportunity as a head coach in the NHL, Carbery is well known to the Capitals and the hockey operations department. Carbery started his coaching career in the Caps' system, and he is now beginning his third separate coaching stint in the Washington organization.

Carbery, a 41-year-old native of Victoria, B.C., isn't even among the top five youngest coaches in franchise history, but he is the first coach the Caps have ever hired who was born after the team came into existence in 1974. He follows Peter Laviolette, who departed in mid-April after a three-season stint as Washington's head coach. At the time of his departure, Laviolette was the oldest coach in Washington's franchise history; he was 58 when he and the Capitals parted ways last month. Carbery spent the last two seasons as an assistant coach with the Toronto Maple Leafs, where he was in charge of running the team's power play.

Prior to his two-year stint with Toronto, Carbery had spent most of his coaching career in the Washington organization. Following a pro playing career as a left wing that topped out at the ECHL level, Carbery became an assistant for Washington's ECHL South Carolina affiliate in 2010-11. After just one season at that post, he ascended to the head coach's seat for the Stingrays in 2011-12, starting a five-year run as the South Carolina bench boss. His team reached the Kelly Cup Final in his penultimate season on the job there, and the Stingrays' winning pct. increased in each of his five seasons behind the bench. Carbery departed Charleston to take the head coaching job with OHL Saginaw in 2016-17.

The Saginaw gig ended after one season, and it was followed by a move up the coaching ladder to AHL Providence, where Carbery spent the 2017-18 season as an assistant coach under Jay Leach with the P-Bruins. In the summer of 2018, Carbery returned to the Washington organization as the head coach at AHL Hershey.

Carbery spent three seasons behind the Bears' bench, and once again his teams increased their winning pct. in each of those campaigns. Following the pandemic-shortened season of 2020-21, Carbery departed the Caps' organization for a second time, joining the Maple Leafs to work alongside head coach Sheldon Keefe, and checking the final box on his climb up the coaching ladder.

Now that he has ascended to the top coaching spot in the organization, Carbery becomes the first person to serve as a head coach of South Carolina, Hershey and Washington, and he is the fourth to work as head coach in both Hershey and Washington, following Gary Green, Bryan Murray and Bruce Boudreau. Carbery is one of only four coaches to win coach of the year honors at both the ECHL and AHL levels.

In the penultimate season of his playing career, Carbery played for the Kelly Cup champion South Carolina Stingrays in 2008-09. He was one of eight Stingrays who skated in all 23 postseason games for the Jared Bednar-coached Stingrays that spring. Now, Carbery becomes the first player coached by Bednar - at any pro level - to land a head coaching position in the NHL. That's fitting, because five years ago, Carbery named Bednar as the coach who has had the biggest impact on his career.

When Carbery returned to the Caps' organization to coach the Bears in the summer of 2018, we conducted a 10-minute one-on-one interview with him, and he named Bednar and Cail MacLean - another former South Carolina coach - as having the biggest impact on his career to that point.

"I would say for me it was Cail MacLean," said Carbery, "but also Jared Bednar, who I played for and got to know and had more of a professional relationship with and picked his brain. He is someone that I've leaned on a lot and have learned from, because he has been through all of these situations that I'm just trying to embark on. He's been a mentor. I always had a lot of respect for him as a player, for his coaching style and the way he taught. So I've really tried to lean on him a lot."

It was MacLean who initially suggested that Carbery give some thought to joining the coaching ranks, something that had never once crossed his mind until he started as an assistant with the Stingrays some 13 years ago.

"Not at all, no," said Carbery. "It was just basically dumb luck. Cail MacLean, a phenomenal guy, was the coach [at South Carolina]. I remember calling him about playing again, and he said, 'Well, what do you think about coaching?' And I kind of took the hint that maybe my playing days were numbered. So I thought about it. I had never thought about it before, but I took some time and thought that this might be something that I would really enjoy. And then as soon as I started - even as an assistant coach - I knew this was for me. It was just so rewarding for me, being able to give back and to try to help players to get to places that I wasn't able to reach. I knew right away that this was my passion."

Carbery spent the last 13 years working his way to the top of his profession, and now he has arrived. He takes the reins of a Washington team that missed the playoffs for the first time in nine seasons, and one which figures to look a bit different between now and opening night of the 2023-24 season in October.

On Thursday, the Caps will conduct a press conference to formally introduce Carbery as their next head coach, and he'll be asked about how a Carbery-coached Caps team will look and play on the ice. Five summers ago, we asked the same question when Carbery was set to make his debut as an AHL head coach.

"There are two things for me that teams that I've coached try to take pride in," he said. "And it's non-skill related and it's non-execution related. We are going to work on both sides of the puck, and when coaches and teams talk about speed on both sides of the puck, we will skate and we will work. That's a non-negotiable for me when it comes to the pro level.

"And then just paying attention to details and being a smart player. Everybody has to be able to make reads and make decisions to play in the NHL at a real quick pace. We're going to do things and have a certain structure and it's not going to be overly complicated, but we are going to expect our guys to be able to execute that well and be able to make those reads and decisions. So it's that speed and that work with and without the puck, and then we're going to defend and attack with some detail to our game, and everybody is going to be on the same page when it comes to that."