The Washington Capitals’ playoff hopes are, unfortunately, no more. A campaign that should’ve built on the success of its immediate predecessor instead backslid just a little bit too much to include a postseason berth that would have, at a minimum, provided valuable experience to young players and another bite at the apple for at least one elder statesman.
But that’s okay (sorta) – progress isn’t usually linear, and there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about this team’s future, including most notably a core trio of young skaters that might be even better than advertised.
Still… missing the playoffs by such a narrow margin stings pretty bad. And while they ultimately have no one to blame but themselves for coming up short, there are a few places where just meeting realistic expectations would’ve been enough to give them the little bump they needed to get in.
This is, of course, an exercise in counterfactual reasoning, wishful thinking and regret (to say nothing of questionable mathematics), but, hey, we’re Caps fans – this stuff is our bread and butter (and, to be sure, there are probably just as many things that exceeded reasonable expectations to balance these out and land the Caps where they landed). But it would have made all the difference in the world if only…
1. …the Caps’ power play wasn’t such utter trash.
We’ve talked about this ad nauseum (since at least early November, in fact, and that’s just this season), but it’s the most obvious culprit here, so we’ll mention it again and try to put a final number on it. It’s been generally accepted in the hockey analytics community for longer than Ryan Leonard (or Cole Hutson or Ilya Protas) has been alive that roughly every six goals translates to a win, or two standings points (the math initially worked out to 5.3 marginal goals per win (PDF), and that number has fluctuated a bit over time, but six goals is a pretty commonly used and conservative approximation), so we’ll use that throughout this post.
Currently, the Caps’ putrescent power play has scored 42 goals in 238 opportunities, a 17.6 conversion rate that ranks them 27th in the League. Want one more standings point (i.e. three more goals in our back-of-the-envelope calculations)? They’d only have needed to have clicked at 18.9%, which would bump them all the way up to… 23rd. A full win (six goals) would be a 20.2% efficiency, which would rank 18th on the circuit. In other words, the Caps wouldn’t have even needed a League-average power play to add another couple of points and improve their position in the table. Alex Ovechkin, for his part, was a career 14.7% shooter on the power play before converting at a career-low 6.1% this year; give him that 14.7% rate and there’s seven goals (and two standings points) right there.
Oh, and here’s the kicker (and where it kicks is not a place you want to be kicked) – while playing a man or two to the good, they’ve yielded 11 shorthanded goals on the season. League-average is 6.3. So they’re most of the way to a full two points in the standings even with their crappy power-play offense if they were just “not terrible” at allowing shorties.
A League-average power play (both in terms of conversion rate (21.1%) and shorthand goals allowed) would have increased the Caps’ goal differential by 13 (i.e. just north of four standings points), and put them comfortably in the playoffs.
2. …the Caps had gotten League-average backup goaltending.
Another point we’ve discussed before, so we won’t belabor it here, but as good as Logan Thompson has been this year, Charlie Lindgren has been nearly as bad:
So MoneyPuck has Lindgren at -5.3 goals saved above expectations and Stevenson at 1.4 for a net -3.9 from the pair of understudies and HockeyViz has Lindgren at -7.8 and Stevenson at 1.0 for a net of -6.8. Let’s split the difference and call it -5.4… or basically two standings points.
3. …the Caps had been able to beat the literal worst team in hockey.
The Vancouver Canucks are the worst team in the NHL. By a lot. In fact, only seven teams since the 2004-05 lockout have finished a full 82-game season with fewer points than the 56 the ‘Nucks have managed so far in 2025-26. Granted, Vancity has two games left this season, so they could jump all the way to “only the 18th-lowest point total of this era.” Godspeed.
As it stands, the Canucks have 24 wins, and 1/12th of them have come against the Caps via a pair of 4-3 regulation wins, both of which featured Vancouver rattling off four-straight goals (first, at the outset of a game back in October, then after the Caps had taken a 2-0 lead in a January affair).
The Caps have also dropped points to the second-worst team in the League, Chicago (1-0-1), and the third-worst Rangers (2-2-0), but those two Vancouver losses are particularly ugly. Split ’em and it’s obviously another two points in the standings.
4. …the Caps were better (or had better luck) in shootouts.
League-average win percentage in shootouts is 50% because duh. The Caps were 2-6 in those situations, so whether you attribute that to luck or skill (their shootout shooting percentage plus save percentage ranked 23rd in the League), there’s another couple of points dangling out there. The Flyers, for their part, sneak into the playoffs with a League-high 10 shootout wins. Gross. (Under Spencer Carbery, the Caps are 8-14 in shootouts and haven’t had a .500 season yet, so there may be some “there” there.)
5. …the “Cockroach Caps” were a little bit more like last year’s “Comeback Caps.”
No team in the NHL has opened the scoring more frequently than the Caps, who have done so in 50 of their 81 games so far. They’ve paired that nicely with a top-five win percentage when leading after one period, the fifth-best Goals-For percentage when up a single goal, and the sixth best mark when leading overall. You’d think that would add up to better than middle-of-the-pack in win percentage when scoring first, but you’d be wrong – they’re 15th there (34-10-6).
But what the Caps really haven’t been able to do is mount comebacks the way they did a season ago (and there’s no doubt that Pierre-Luc Dubois’ prolonged absence was a big contributor here). In 2024-25, the Caps led the League in comeback wins (with 25); this year, they’re dead last with just seven (granted, scoring first so often limits your opportunities to come back in games, but they’ve still lost 30 times in regulation, so they’ve trailed plenty). In those 31 games in which the Caps haven’t opened the scoring this year, they’re just 8-20-3 and sporting the League’s 8th-worst winning percentage. What’s particularly interesting here is that by strategic (risk-averse?) design and/or personnel availability and/or other factors, the Caps are a very different team when down a goal at five-on-five than they were a year ago:
The results have been different as well. The Caps’ all-strengths goals-for percentage (GF%) when they’re down a goal this year ranks 23rd in the League at 45.8% (43.8% when trailing overall); last year they ranked fifth at 54.4% down one and were a League-best 56.2% when trailing overall. Down a goal last year, the Caps scored at the second-highest rate in the League; this year, second-lowest. Expected goal rates between the two segments are much closer, so it may be little more than regression hitting, but, regardless, the Caps don’t have “it” the way they did a year ago when it comes back to coming back.
6. …the Caps were in the Pacific Division (or the Western Conference, generally).
This one’s silly because obviously they’d have played a different schedule with different travel, etc., but with 93 points, the Caps would currently be leading the Pacific Division, four points clear of the Western wild card cutoff. Then again, that would mean at least one more game against the Canucks, so who knows? The Caps have a +18 goal differential and will miss the playoffs while the Ducks (-15) and Kings (-19) are officially in (which Caps fans can’t really complain about after seeing their team make the playoffs at -37 two years back). Only four teams in the East have fewer points than the worst playoff-bound Westerners. What the heck.
(Fun fact sidebar: the Caps actually were in a division with the Kings when the former entered the League.)
There are plenty of other “What if?” scenarios (including wondering if they waited too long to go get Ilya Protas from Hershey), but the ones above are among those that the Caps and their fans are likely to be thinking about all summer long.