The Capitals begin their season Friday night in Raleigh against the defending champion Hurricanes. (For the home opener in D.C., you’ll have to wait until next Wednesday, when they’ll face the Penguins.)
Here’s what you need to know.
Last season: Rather disappointing. The Capitals finished 43-30-9 and missed the playoffs for just the second time since 2015.
What’s new: A lot. This was the Caps’ busiest offseason in years. Over two days in June, they acquired both Alex Tuch and Jordan Kyrou, two of the most dynamic forwards to be moved this offseason. (Each has recorded 30 or more goals in at least two of the last three seasons.) They should add some meaningful scoring and significantly change the look of the attack. The Caps also added further depth in the form of veteran forward Boone Jenner and defenseman Vincent Desharnais.
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In other contract news: Capitals general manager Chris Patrick used the summer to lock up two promising young players: Ryan Leonard and Justin Sourdif both signed eight-year deals. And perhaps you heard that one more player agreed to stay with the club: 41-year-old captain Alex Ovechkin decided to return for, presumably, one final season with the Capitals.
Can they fix the power play? Here was one of the biggest problems for the 2025-26 Capitals. They ranked 25th in the NHL in power-play percentage — with part of their struggle to score coming from their struggle with zone entries. (The Caps spent less of their man-advantage time in the offensive zone than every team in the league except the Jets.)
To that end, Capitals head coach Spencer Carbery added Ray Bennett to his staff this summer. Bennett most recently spent nine seasons with the Avalanche and has specialized in the power play for decades. The team hopes that combining a new assistant with some new personnel — Tuch and Kyrou should both appear on the power play — will help considerably.
How much will their size matter? This is perhaps the most obvious change to the team this year: they’re big. Desharnairs is 6-foot-7. (“A mountain of a man,” in the words of goalie Logan Thompson.) The Protas brothers, Aliaksei and Ilya, are both 6-6. (After spending most of last year in the AHL with the Hershey Bears, 20-year-old Ilya will start this season in D.C., playing on a line with his older brother.) Tuch is 6-4 and forming a line with the similarly large Tom Wilson and Pierre-Luc Dubois. Asked if this was the biggest team he’s ever played on, Tuch said it was perhaps the biggest team he’s ever seen. (“Maybe the old Flyers teams back in the day.”) But for all the size here, there’s pace, too.
“It’s not only the size, but it’s the speed, too, that all these guys bring,” said center Dylan Strome, who is not exactly small himself at 6-4. “They can fly. I think just overall, our team speed got faster over the summer, and that’s only going to benefit all four lines.”
The group will certainly make an impression. No NHL team has dressed six forwards who are all at least 6-4 since 2008. The Capitals should do that on opening night.
Could this be the best caps team since 2018? It very well could be. Expectations are the highest they have been in years. The additions of Tuch and Kyrou should help balance the offense. Even though Ovechkin’s role has changed in recent years as he’s gotten older and his ice time has shifted accordingly, he’s still led the team in scoring every single year. But that may not be the case this year, and more crucially, Washington may not really need that to be the case. There’s considerably more depth here than last season. The group is almost entirely healthy — Rasmus Sandin is the only major injury on the roster. (The defenseman had surgery in April to repair a torn ACL.) Training camp arrived with a legitimate sense of hope.
Strome is entering his fifth season in D.C., and none of them has felt quite like this, he said.
“This is the first year with real high expectations,” he said, “where we feel like we have a good enough team to make some noise and to do something really special.”
Only Wilson and Ovechkin remain from the group who won the Stanley Cup in 2018. But the additions made this summer, alongside the continued emergence of young talent like Leonard, Sourdif and Cole Hutson, has this group thinking big.
“We’re hungry now,” Wilson said at the start of training camp. “The last few years, we haven’t been where we want to be … I’m hungry to go and see what this team can do, because there’s some hype, there’s some expectations there, and we’ve created that standard.”
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