TORONTO — The retool on the fly that was the talk of the NHL last season, with the Washington Capitals surprisingly finishing first in the Eastern Conference, is still happening. It’s just getting a little less national fanfare because of a tumble in the standings.
But the NHL debut of Ilya Protas on Wednesday night was the latest bit of evidence of Washington’s continuing roster renovation. Piece by piece, the youth movement is taking hold.
“It’s been fun for sure,” Caps general manager Chris Patrick said Wednesday of seeing some of the organization’s top prospects make the jump. “I was joking with some people in the office, we’ve had a couple of years now where we can’t wait to see Ryan Leonard’s first game, we can’t wait to see Cole Hutson’s, and now Ilya Protas’. ‘Oh, man, I feel like we’ve opened all our presents and Christmas morning is over.’
“But they reminded me, we’ve got a lot of other guys to also be excited about.”
Protas, 19, joins older brother Aliaksei Protas, 25, on the Caps. Both are 6 feet 6, both third-round draft picks five years apart — otherwise known as found money thanks to some impressive scouting work.
Hutson’s debut last month electrified the fans. Leonard’s joining late last season was a blast.
It was just three years ago the aging Capitals missed the playoffs and were sellers at the deadline. It seemed like the team was destined for a multiyear decline.
Instead, while selling at that deadline, Washington also did some buying, acquiring defenseman Rasmus Sandin, then 22, from the Toronto Maple Leafs for the Boston Bruins’ first-round draft pick that year (and Erik Gustafsson), a pick the Caps had acquired just five days earlier for Garnet Hathaway.
From there, the Caps have continued to wheel and deal and draft, with the idea being to stay competitive in the here and now while developing the next generation to populate the roster as well.
And now, it’s the younger Protas, who had 28 goals and 62 points in 66 AHL games, joining the push, another key cog in Washington’s turning things over.
“I’m really excited about Ilya,” Patrick said during a sit-down interview with The Athletic. “This is something we figured we’d do at some point, maybe even earlier in the year, but it just never worked out roster-wise and timing-wise. He’s certainly done everything he can possibly do in the AHL.”
All of which helps digest what has happened in the standings this season. The bigger picture remains on track, even if the Caps end up missing the postseason, which looks likely in a year in which the East playoff race was so competitive it was 12 teams deep.
“Like a lot of teams, you’re always balancing the now and the future, and for us right now, we just happen to have a lot of the future pieces starting to get to that point where they’re getting NHL-ready and time to get NHL reps,” Patrick said. “I mean, I was hoping we’d be firmly in a playoff spot and these guys would be in as well. We’re not out of it yet — we’re still competing for it — so we’ll see what we can do.”
There weren’t that many people actually picking the Caps to finish first again. Part of that is the parity of the conference. Part of it is the natural regression that seemed inevitable for Washington. But most still viewed the Caps as a playoff team.
“Going into the season, I felt like we had a good enough team to be firmly in those top three spots in the Metro Division, and at one point, we were first in the Metro,” Patrick said.
They were first in the division from Dec. 3 to 10, but never again. A busy January — 16 games in 31 days — was compounded by already having Pierre-Luc Dubois out injured and joined on the shelf by Tom Wilson and the older Protas, which led to a 6-8-2 record in those 16 games.
“That was one of our top two lines last year, and we had all three out for an extended period,” Patrick said. “We just couldn’t string wins together. So we started stumbling in the standings a little bit.”
All of which led to a hugely difficult decision ahead of the March 6 trade deadline. The Caps were on the playoff bubble and decided to trade away pending unrestricted free agent defenseman John Carlson, a legacy player on the team.
“It was hard,” Patrick said. “Essentially, we’re at a point where we have younger players coming in, and at some point, we have to hand the reins to those younger players. And that’s not just the Cole Hutsons and Ryan Leonards, but even the guys like Aliaksei (Protas), Martin Fehervary — even Jakob Chychrun isn’t an old guy.
“There was certainly discussion — do we do a deal in-season with John and extend him for a certain time frame and keep him with the Caps. Maybe if we were in a different spot in the standings, that would be something we’d continue to look at. But given where we were and the fact we are in a transitioning era of the Caps here, we had to look at what was out there as a possible return for him.”
When the Anaheim Ducks stepped up with a first-round pick plus a third-round pick for Carlson, the Caps GM felt he had to take it.
That didn’t make it any easier to swallow for veterans on the team like Ovechkin or Wilson, and certainly not for the fans. But just like the Tampa Bay Lightning and their difficult decision to part ways with Steven Stamkos, some painful team decisions make sense in the bigger picture.
“That’s part of the job that I have to do,” Patrick said. “There’s the here and now, but there’s also the future. I’ve got to be able to justify our trade deadline decisions to ownership and how that’s impacted our team now and setting us up for the future. We just felt as a hockey operations group that it was a prudent decision to get those assets for John and hopefully use them to improve our team either this summer or in the future.”
Using those assets is absolutely the plan, if possible. It’s been a priority for almost a year to upgrade up front with a scoring winger. The Caps came close but lost out to the Carolina Hurricanes in July on free agent Nikolaj Ehlers. They also went all in trying to trade for Artemi Panarin before the Olympics, but the Los Angeles Kings won out.
This summer, given the state of the UFA class (although Alex Tuch would probably fit in perfectly if he goes to market), the trade route will be the avenue for Patrick.
“I’m hoping there will be trades there this summer, but I also think teams that are maybe willing to move a top guy understand that it’s a sellers’ market, so the prices will be high,” Patrick said. “So we had to put ourselves hopefully in a position to have as many different pieces that we can use to get somebody.
“And if we don’t trade the picks and use them instead, hopefully we have more prospects for our team or who can be used in future deals.”
Speaking of scoring wingers, the best one ever is still doing his thing at age 40. Alex Ovechkin leads Washington with 31 goals in what could be his last NHL season. No. 8 announced Wednesday that he was going to wait until the summer to make his decision on whether to retire.
“I have no sense of his intentions,” Patrick said. “Other than he’s told us he wants to wait until the offseason to make his decision, which I totally get and respect. I really don’t know. I don’t know if he truly, honestly knows deep down yet what he wants to do.
“We’ll just continue to help him and support him in his decision-making process however we can. And whenever he’s ready to tell us, we’ll be ready to hear it.”
The Caps are already on the lookout for a scoring winger. If Ovechkin does decide to retire this summer, that would become a double-whammy situation.
“I look at the offseason as a choose-your-own-adventure book,” Patrick said. “A scenario will come up in May, and then you’re going to have to make your decisions based on that. And then another scenario comes up in June. So we’ll just look at it that way. If he says to us, ‘I’m going to retire,’ then we’ll start making decisions based on that decision. And if he says he wants to come back, we’ll make moves based on that. We’ll take the path that presents itself to us.”
And finally, if the Caps do miss the playoffs, forget about any questions about coach Spencer Carbery’s status. Last year’s Jack Adams Award winner as NHL coach of the year didn’t get dumb over 12 months. His job is not in question.
“He’s 100 percent our coach now and in the future,” Patrick said without hesitation. “I just think he’s the total package. He’s come in and showed as a first-time coach in the NHL that he can get the respect of veteran guys and get them to play the system he wants them to play, and he’s shown he can develop young players, too.
“As long as we can have him, we will.”