Just over 24 hours into their 2024 training camp, the Capitals are also less than 48 hours away from their first of six exhibition outings in preparation for the Oct. 12 season opener against the New Jersey Devils. Philadelphia visits the District on Sunday for the first preseason tilt for both Metropolitan Division rivals.
Sunday’s game starts a front-loaded preseason slate for the Caps, who will play their first four preseason games in a span of just six nights; the last two exhibition games are spread over a more leisurely eight-day span, and the Caps will spend a chunk of that downtime in Columbus following the Sept. 30 preseason game in Ohio’s capital city.
There are challenges involved with such an imbalanced preseason schedule. After taking on the Flyers on Sunday, Monday is a scheduled off day. The Caps’ game group for Tuesday’s game in Boston will skate here that morning, then fly to Beantown for the game that night. The team will fly home immediately after, and a fresh set of troops will follow a similar itinerary for Wednesday’s road game against the Devils in New Jersey. A home date against Columbus follows on Friday, Sept. 27.
“Yeah, that’s not ideal,” admits Caps’ coach Spencer Carbery. “We tried to – as best we can – plan for it accordingly, but the four [games] in six [nights], it doesn’t give us a lot of time as a staff. The players are fine, because they’re not going to play in the back-to-back [Tuesday in Boston and Wednesday in New Jersey].
“So for the guys who don’t play in Boston, it will be business as usual. But for us, it will be a little more challenging to turn around from that Boston game: ‘Okay, what did we like? What didn’t we like?’ and then to convey those messages and also get ready for Jersey. That’s definitely the con of it; the pro is you get some games in early, right away, and you can evaluate and make some decisions based on that.”
There isn’t much time between the start of camp and the exhibition opener, either, but that’s the case for most teams and has been since the League wisely opted to condense camps to about three and a half weeks some years back.
“Us as coaches, we’d always love a little bit more time to implement some of the things that we’d like to see,” says Carbery. “But at the same time, you understand that they want to get games going. And ultimately, to evaluate, we need to see game action. So we try to be as smart as we can with how much information to give and how much is just ‘go out there and play, and show what you’re capable of doing,’ especially in those early preseason games.”
Another challenge involves the number of bodies in camp, which is well above the number we’ve seen in most recent camps. The Caps have 70 players on their camp roster, not including injured vets Nicklas Backstrom and T.J. Oshie. Among those 70, another six have missed the first two days for a variety of reasons. But even with 64 players, there are three groups and the first days of camp are long ones for the coaching and hockey operations staffs.
With seven offseason additions to the roster, Carbery and company must balance the need to see the kids with the need to find the right lineup fits for their incoming new veterans.
“At the beginning,” says Carbery, “at least through the exhibition games, it will be about getting some young guys in early on, and seeing where they’re at, and seeing how they look in NHL exhibition games. And then, do we need to see them again? And then as we start to move along in the preseason, it’s starting to integrate the veteran guys. And that’s where we’ll evaluate new guys and new faces, where are they at, and what line combinations look good. Where do we have some chemistry? And where do some of the structure pieces – where do we need to make sure they’re improving or learning those concepts?”
Lastly, the first days of camp are typically spent on becoming familiar with systems, and special teams tend to take a back seat in the early days. But the group that takes the ice for Sunday’s opener with the Flyers will get some special teams rehearsal as part of Saturday’s session at MedStar Capitals Iceplex.
“We’ll focus on that [Saturday] for the game group in one of the portions of practice, so that we can just be organized,” states Carbery. “We want the guys that are going to play that first game to have at least some idea who they’re going to be out there with special teams-wise, and what we’d like to see – we don’t want to go crazy with information and a ton of stuff – just some general guidelines.”
Time CAPSule 50 – Sunday’s exhibition opener falls on the 50th anniversary of the Caps’ first-ever preseason game, a Sept. 22, 1974 contest against the Buffalo Sabres in St. Catharines, Ont. The Sabres prevailed 4-2, with Washington’s goals coming from John Paddock and Jack Egers. In those days, teams had much more time between the opening of camp and the first exhibition.
Washington’s first-ever training camp – and a five-day rookie camp before main camp – was held entirely in London, Ontario where the team hosted some of its “home” preseason games; two of them were played in Landover at the virtually new Capital Centre. The first-ever Caps rookie camp ran from Sept. 9-13, 1974, and main training camp opened on Sept. 14. That first preseason game came eight days after camp got underway.
