The Washington Capitals named Spencer Carbery the 20th head coach in the franchise’s history last May. Carbery was seen as one of the hottest, young coaching prospects in hockey and had a lengthy history within the Capitals’ organization.
The decision to hire him looked like a no-brainer. However, according to Sportsnet’s Elliotte Friedman, that wasn’t exactly the case for Capitals general manager Brian MacLellan — the man who oversaw the head coaching search.
In his latest 32 Thoughts column, Elliotte Friedman outlined a conversation he had with MacLellan at the recent GM meetings in Florida. Apparently, MacLellan had some initial qualms about how Carbery wanted his Capitals team to play defense.
We’ll get to that, but he revealed something pretty interesting about hiring Spencer Carbery. The Capitals play a lot of defensive-zone man-to-man, and, when the coach said that was his philosophy during the interview process, MacLellan didn’t like the idea. But, the organization knew Carbery, wanted to hire him and decided that wasn’t going to be a dealbreaker. “I talked about it with our staff,” MacLellan said. “If you’re going to hire a coach, you have to let him coach the way he wants.” Carbery’s done a great job keeping Washington in the race. Early in the season, they looked slow and discombobulated.
Before Carbery arrived, the Capitals had been playing a hybrid defensive system between man-to-man and zone under Peter Laviolette for a few years. Carbery then came into the organization and instantly expressed a desire to add pace to the team and explicitly mentioned that pace does not just mean players skating faster.
A man-to-man defense can help teams speed up all over the ice as its goal is to neutralize offensive threats as quickly as possible with defenders that immediately know their assignments. In theory, those defenders will be quicker to close down and attack pucks, cause more turnovers, and then move the puck up ice.
We’ve seen both the good and the bad of a man-to-man system with the Capitals this season. When it works, they limit teams to little offense which has allowed them to win games despite their own anemic scoring. When it hasn’t worked, defenders have been put on islands, breakdowns occur, extended shifts are spent in their zone, and the Capitals have been left chasing games that turn into blowouts. Hence, the strange dichotomy of being a potential playoff team but also having a minus-31 goal differential.
The struggles were more prevalent at the beginning of the season as the team learned Carbery’s system on the fly. While they still do exist now, they are fewer and farther between. Since the All-Star break, the Capitals have controlled 50.4 percent of the expected goals, 51.5 percent of the scoring chances, and 51.8 percent of the high-danger chances at five-on-five.
MacLellan spoke about how the team has changed as the season has gone on and how Carbery is behind that change during his recent pre-trade deadline media availability.
“He’s doing a great job, I think,” MacLellan said. “You look at our roster at the beginning of the year, we had [Nicklas Backstrom], we had [Evgeny Kuznetsov]. I think it’s shifted. It’s evolved into all of a sudden we have [Hendrix Lapierre] last night (at) first-line center, [Dylan Strome] second, [Connor McMichael]…however you want to slot those guys. It’s a different-looking team and it’s played well since the break. I give Spencer a lot of credit for that, how he’s evolved it, how he’s created a culture here for young guys to compete, to get better. He holds them accountable. And he’s engaged our old guys too.”
The change is most evident with the team’s position in the standings. As recently as Tuesday, the Capitals were in a playoff spot in the Eastern Conference. They have put together an 11-6-2 record since February 10 and remain just one point behind the Detroit Red Wings…
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