With a quiet, assured confidence, he didn’t need any.
“I still feel like we have a very competitive team,” Carbery said. “I understand what’s going on from our roster’s age and where we need to go, building for the future and integrating young players, but I still, as the head coach, have a lot of belief in our group. I think we can be threading the needle and also be very, very competitive and be a playoff team. That’s what I believe. … Whatever you want to say about last year, I still think that we’re capable of being a playoff team.”
In the preseason, every team believes it is capable of making the playoffs. Every new coach believes he’s positioned to right the wrongs of the previous regime. At the time, Carbery’s statement rang more like the bravado, if not naiveté, of a young, first-year coach who had little idea how difficult the road ahead would be.
But six months and 10 days after Carbery said those words, his Capitals proved him right. With a win over the Philadelphia Flyers on Tuesday, Washington secured the second wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference and is back in the Stanley Cup playoffs.
The Capitals, who missed the playoffs last season, have the worst goal differential, minus-37, of any playoff team in the salary cap era. In nine of their last 10 regular season games, and 42 of 82 overall, they scored two or fewer goals. Their power play, which spent so much of the season near the bottom of the league, only improved to 17th — still in the bottom half.
And yet they’re in the playoffs.
“I believed in this group the whole way through,” Charlie Lindgren, who emerged as the Capitals’ No. 1 goaltender and sometimes single-handedly kept them afloat, said Tuesday. “Obviously, there were times where maybe it looked like it was maybe going to be a little bit of a stretch, but certainly there was no give-up at all in this group. It says a lot about the guys in the locker room. All the credit goes to them.”
In early October, Carbery was banking on having Nicklas Backstrom and Evgeny Kuznetsov as his top two centers, providing a veteran, Stanley Cup-winning foundation for their new coach. Backstrom made it just eight games before stepping away in early November. Things didn’t go as planned with Kuznetsov, either, with a benching in December, a stint in the NHL’s player assistance program in February and a trade to the Carolina Hurricanes in March.
Washington also traded winger Anthony Mantha, who scored 20 goals in 56 games, and defenseman Joel Edmundson ahead of the deadline. It could have been a moment in which the Capitals decided to pack it in and focus on next season. Instead, it proved to be a turning point.
“There’s so many different moments where this team has shown its true character throughout this year of finding different ways to win,” Carbery said after Monday’s shutout of the Boston Bruins. “And, as well, when our backs were against the wall and our season was on the brink in multiple situations — post-deadline, we move some guys out. Easy for our group to say: ‘You know what? It’s been a great run. We’re not going for it this year, so we’ll just ride off into the sunset.’
“It wasn’t even close to that. Our guys are like, ‘We’re going to find a way.’ ”
That sentiment became something of a mantra for Washington as the season went along and it became clear that these Capitals were not going to be the run-and-gun, score-at-will version of years past. They had to win games the hard way — grinding out one-goal victories and battling for…
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