The Washington Capitals were not ready to become bad

Their past few years of roster management is intriguing and deserves to be looked at.

You should never be in a hurry to see your team become bad. Especially in the NHL.

Every time a team loses early in the playoffs, goes through an extended run of mediocrity or is anything less than a true championship contender there is an impulsive reaction from fans and media to just start over, tear it all down and rebuild.

Get rid of everybody.

Look to the future.

Start tanking.

Draft picks, draft picks, draft picks.

Given how long it takes for those sorts of rebuilds to happen in the NHL, and how rarely they succeed the way you want them to succeed, and how much luck has to go into it for them to succeed, nobody should be in a hurry to see that happen. You are not guaranteed to get a Sidney Crosby, or an Alex Ovechkin, or an Auston Matthews, or a Connor McDavid with any of those picks. If you want to have it all work, you need to be lucky enough to not only get one of them, you also need to get a second player that is just a step below them (an Evgeni Malkin, or Nicklas Backstrom, or Mitch Marner, or Leon Draisaitl). It is just a lot of things that need to go right.

It fails more often than it succeeds.

If there is still a chance to compete and stay relevant, you should want to see your team try to do it. Maybe it is just prolonging the timeline into the future. But maybe it still gives you a chance to see a team that is at least capable of something. Maybe you can turn it around quicker than you anticipate.

That brings us to the 2024-25 Washington Capitals who enter the second half of the season in first place in the NHL’s Metropolitan Division, have the best record in the Eastern Conference and the second-best record in the entire NHL (by points percentage).

Given where this team was just two years ago nobody could have — or should have — really seen this coming. At least not this quickly.

Let’s go back to the 2022-23 season. The Capitals were coming off a run of four consecutive first-round defeats. They were the second-oldest team in the league with 10 of their top-12 scorers all being over the age of 30. It was a team whose peak had already happened, their core players were getting older and fading away, and every indication was that they should start turning the page and looking toward the future.

They did start selling some pieces.

But not all of their pieces.

What they did with the assets they got in return for the players they did sell helped set the stage for the current team that is near the top of the NHL standings.

They had some big salary cap luck in the form of players like Backstrom and T.J. Oshie going on LTIR, but they also had some important pieces work their way up through the system and start to make an impact, while also making a series of shrewd moves that have mostly hit.

They also did not waste the new found salary cap space they ended up with.

They also had the most important organizational ingredient — a desire to still try and compete instead of just throwing in the towel.

It honestly all starts with the 2023 trade deadline.

Going into February of that season the Capitals had several pending unrestricted free agents on their roster, including Dylan Strome, Dmitry Orlov, Garnet Hathaway, Lars Eller and Marcus Johansson.

Here is what they did with those players:

• Strome had joined the Capitals in the summer of 2022 after the Chicago Blackhawks just …. let him go …. when they still controlled his RFA rights and after he had a breakout year offensively. It was staggeringly bad asset management, and the Capitals benefitted. They signed him for $3 million and watched him put together a 23-goal, 65-point season at the age of 25. They could have probably easily traded him for a first-round pick or decent prospect at the deadline as part of a rebuild everybody thought they needed. Instead, they re-signed him to a five-year, $25 million contract that, just two years into it, already looks like a solid value. He is still in his mid-20s and has become one of their top centers. And a pretty good one. As of Wednesday he has 45 points in 40 games and is the leading scorer on the top team in the Eastern Conference.

• They packaged Orlov and Hathaway in a three-team deal with the Boston Bruins and Minnesota Wild that brought them Craig Smith (a pending UFA) and three draft picks: a 2023 first-round pick, a 2024 third-round pick and a 2025 second-round pick.

• They traded Johansson to the Wild for an additional 2024 third-round pick.

• They traded Eller to the Colorado Avalanche for a 2025 second-round draft pick.

In total, the four rentals they traded resulted in FIVE future draft picks, all within the first three rounds of the draft.

Solid value.

It was a clear effort to sell and stockpile long-term, future assets.

But it is what they did with those picks that matters.

Let’s talk about it.