C-A-P-S

[skinsmarydu]

Joe B and Locker with TJ Oshie on Monumental now as he announced his retirement.

I'm cryin'.

 

[turtle]

any thoughts on the Caps free agency movement? Loss of players? I'm trying to keep up with the latest news.

 

[SkinsNumberOne]

any thoughts on the Caps free agency movement? Loss of players? I'm trying to keep up with the latest news.

Next year will be the Ovie goodbye year, I think. They aren't being very specific but Ovie has been pretty clear on a personal level that he wants to play 1 final year in Russia and he's hinted at it pretty strongly in some interviews.

So, the team is structured around making the transition. A really tough transition, but they are structured reasonably well to do it if things fall nicely for them - basically, the prospects that they have, work out.

Protas had a really good year last year. His brother is in the system and has shown a lot of promise. The future looks bright. They have dudes like Cristall, Hutson... these are guys who have as much promise as almost any unproven guy on any team.
As for next year... it will be interesting to see what they put together, but as we saw last year, Carlson and Ovie just couldn't put it together in the postseason, and the team kind of folded around them. The team will need a lot more seasoning, maybe sprinkled with some better in-season coaching decisions tailored at winning the *postseason* rather than the regular season.

So I wouldn't say I am super confident in 2025-2026 postseason success (making the postseason? Yes, that is possible), but I think they are kind of set up for 2026 and/or 2027 to be really interesting. At some point the salary issues creep in and you have to keep rotating in/out players, but it's going to be a really interesting and exciting next few years in the meantime.

^^ my take, at least for now.

** Not many FA moves that I've seen. Mange is gone it looks like, they just extended Fehevary... I don't expect any huge shakeups for the above reasons. I don't call losing Mange a big shakeup.