Patrick tasked with keeping Capitals competitive with Ovechkin and beyond

WASHINGTON -- Coming from a family with four generations of Stanley Cup winners and NHL executives, Chris Patrick knows something about succession plans.

Patrick will play a significant role in one after being promoted to senior vice president and general manager by the Washington Capitals on Monday. He takes over the reins from Brian MacLellan, who will remain in a supervisory role as president of hockey operations after 10 seasons as GM, at a critical juncture when the Capitals are preparing to transition to life after Alex Ovechkin.

Ovechkin, who turns 39 on Sept. 17 and is three months from the start of his 20th NHL season, has been the face of the franchise since he was selected by Washington with the No. 1 pick in the 2004 NHL Draft and its captain since 2010. The left wing has two seasons remaining on the five-year, $47.5 million contract ($9.5 million average annual value) he signed in 2021, setting up 2025-2026 as possibly his last season in the NHL.

That should be enough time for Ovechkin to score the 42 goals he needs to break Wayne Gretzky’s NHL record of 894, and his chase of that record will undoubtedly be a big part of the storyline for the Capitals this season and, potentially, the next one. It will be up to Patrick, with guidance from MacLellan, to make sure it would simply be the end of a historic chapter in the franchise’s 50-year history that included its first Stanley Cup championship in 2018.

“My intention is to be competitive,” Patrick said at his introductory news conference Tuesday. “I’m not a guy who likes losing. I truly believe that we can transition, for the lack of a better term, past the Ovechkin era with a competitive team.”

In a way, Patrick was born to do this job -- or at least be an NHL GM. He is among seven Patricks with their names on the Cup as players and/or executives along with grandfather Lester, great uncle Frank, grandfather Muzz, great uncle Lynn, first cousin once removed Craig and father Dick, who has been a minority owner and executive (currently chairman) with the Capitals since 1982.

Lester, Frank, Muzz, Lynn, Craig and Dick all held management positions with NHL teams before him. Chris, who grew up playing in the Little Caps program and at Princeton University (1995-98), followed a different path professionally initially, though.

Utilizing his degrees from Princeton (Bachelor of Science in politics and economics, 1998) and the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia (Masters in business administration, 2006), Chris worked in finance before deciding in 2008 that his true calling was in the family business.

“Going back to when I was a kid and going to my grandparents’ house and seeing the pictures and hearing [Craig] and my dad and my grandfather talk about the game, it was hard not to fall in love with it,” Chris Patrick said.

However, as Dick Patrick noted, “Chris is where he is today because he worked at it.”

The 48-year-old spent 16 years working his way up the Capitals’ organizational ladder, beginning in a player development and part-time scouting role and progressing to pro scout, director of player personnel, assistant GM and associate GM.

MacLellan adding the title of president of hockey operations and Patrick becoming associate GM last August was the first step toward this management transition with Patrick taking on more responsibility last season overseeing Washington’s analytics department, player contract negotiations, hockey operations staff, player personnel, and budget and team scheduling matters.

MacLellan’s job when he replaced George McPhee as GM after Washington missed the Stanley Cup Playoffs in 2014 was to get more out of a star-studded roster with Ovechkin and center Nicklas Backstrom in their primes and much of the rest of the Stanley Cup core ready to emerge, including forwards Evgeny Kuznetsov and Tom Wilson, defensemen John Carlson and Dmitry Orlov and goalie Braden Holtby. MacLellan supplemented that group by adding key players such as defensemen Brooks Orpik and Matt Niskanen, and forwards T.J. Oshie and Lars Eller. The Capitals went 449-244-88 during MacLellan’s tenure -- the third-most wins in the NHL during that span behind the Tampa Bay Lightning (475) and Boston Bruins (466).

Washington qualified for the playoffs nine times, finished first in the Metropolitan Division in five consecutive seasons from 2015-16 to 2019-20, won the Presidents’ Trophy as the NHL’s best team in the regular season in 2015-16 and 2016-17 and, most importantly, finally won the Cup in 2018.

Patrick’s challenge isn’t so much matching MacLellan’s success but stewarding Washington as quickly as possible into the next period when it can contend for the Cup.

“Chris has a lot of work to do, but we’re not lowering the bar,” Capitals owner Ted Leonsis said.

Still, the front-office transition will likely go a lot smoother than the one on the ice. Ovechkin, Oshie, 37, Carlson, 34, and Wilson, 30 are the only remaining players from the Cup team, and Oshie’s playing future is in doubt because of recurring back issues.

Age is also catching up to Ovechkin, who dropped from scoring 42 goals in 2022-23 to 31 last season. That was still enough to lead the Capitals, though, and he scored 23 goals in his final 36 regular-season games to help them qualify for the playoffs as the second wild card from the Eastern Conference with 91 points (40-31-11).

Leonsis and MacLellan promised Ovechkin before he signed his current contract to continue to try to win while he chases the goals record. So, the Capitals have been trying to get younger and retool around him.

They’ve been particularly aggressive this offseason, acquiring forwards Pierre-Luc Dubois, 26, and Andrew Mangiapane, 28, defenseman Jakob Chychrun, 26, and backup goalie Logan Thompson, 27, in trades and signing forwards Taylor Raddysh, 26, and Brandon Duhaime, 27, and defenseman Matt Roy, 29, as unrestricted free agents.

Patrick was part of that decision-making on those moves with MacLellan, who called it, “a group process.” The Capitals see potential in how the new players will fit alongside those previously added such as forward Dylan Strome, 27, and defenseman Rasmus Sandin, 24, and maturing young players acquired through the NHL Draft such as forwards Connor McMichael, 23, Aliaksei Protas, 23, Hendrix Lapierre, 22, and Ivan Miroshnichenko, 20, and defenseman Martin Fehervary, 24.

It’s unlikely a next Ovechkin is among them, but generational players are rare. Washington must try to do it by committee, and Patrick believes they’ve made a good start in that direction.

“I think we made a statement already with what we’ve done this offseason,” he said. “It’s easy for people to say, ‘Your superstars are aging, it’s time to rebuild, blow it up and do it all over again.’ I think in actuality that can be a lot harder than it sounds. You’ve seen a lot of teams try it and kind of get stuck in an endless cycle of tearing it down and building it up and tearing it down and building it up and never getting where they want to be.

“… You’ll see some teams that were able to transition from an older core to a younger team that’s competitive. I think that is definitely on the table for us.”