The Capitals were swept out of the NHL playoffs on Sunday night for the first time in over a decade, and when Monumental Sports Network analyst Alan May joined G&D as part of Monday’s Beltway Blitz to discuss it…let’s just say he was VERY harsh in his analysis.
Starting with the Caps running out of gas, especially on man-up or man-down situations.
“The Rangers were great on both special teams all season long, third-best on both power play and penalty kill overall, and they were just consistent in the playoffs – and you can be that good and dominant when you have a top to bottom roster like they have,” May said. “Their top-six players had 174 points against the Capitals at about 102, and their defense and had about 100 more points as a group than the Caps’ defensemen had. You take all that into consideration, and it’s great the Caps made the playoffs, they fought hard and basically were in the playoffs the whole last month of the season, but they were just overmatched by the best team in the NHL over the course of the regular season.”
So what was missing?
“I just think without being sarcastic, some of the players are just beaten down and kind of aged out, and then the younger players are very inexperienced and were kind of forced in the lineup in some ways,” May said. “Other older players you're forcing into the lineup as well, so it's just a transitional time right now for the Capitals; their guys are getting older and they're all banged up, the young guys are very inexperienced and probably playing in spots that they're not ready for yet. It's just depth, and as it goes forward, do you wanna do a total rebuild? That's what they did at the deadline, they had a fire sale and got rid of guys. They added draft picks and have some good players in the pipeline coming forward, but it's not that time yet.”
May said a friend called the playoff appearance “fools’ gold” while he called it was ‘bonus hockey,’ but going forward, the Caps need to keep getting better and reloading.
“You've got to infuse more high-quality younger players; the draft will be critically important, smarter trades will be critically important, and who can you sign in the free agent market all really matters,” May said. “I do like the fact that they rewarded the older players here with the contracts they did at a time; you always come to regret the high dollar contracts of the older players, but these guys won a Stanley Cup and packed that arena for years, and made Chinatown relevant. They brought a lot of life to the city, but it's time now for the Caps to bring in new players to make sure that they've got something for the younger generation of fans here to be happy about and get people to spend their hard earned money going to games. It's just a transitional time right now for the Capitals.”
Part of that transition, it seems, is May looking for more consistency with the team.
“I'm not upset with any of the players, we all kind of expected this with the matchup against the Rangers and looking at the Caps roster and how they played this season,” he said. “They were up and down all year long; it was like 7 to 10 days, maybe two weeks of bad hockey, and then it was maybe 7 to 10 days of good hockey. It started down, then went up, and just when you thought they were out of it, five or six different times, they stuck the hand out of the grave, crawled out and they kept fighting. So there's a lot that I like to that attitude that they never gave in – whether it was the young guys or the old guys who created that, and the fact that the coaching staff never just started throwing the players under the bus nonstop. In a Canadian market, we probably would have had different results with the amount of outside noise on the team and the bashing of players and coaches. There’s a lot to like about the season and a lot to dislike, and going forward, they're going to try to find and fix all the things that we did not like over the course of this past year.”
That said…
“Everything's on the table at all times because you really have to assess everything, but you can't do it when you're emotional. You have to be very grounded when you look at the team and ask, ‘will we win in three years with this guy, four years with this player or these groups of players?’” May said. “So, tough decisions have to be made, and we've seen the team make tough decisions in the past.”
It sounds from that, though, that one of May’s ideas is possibly assessing who is part of the next core, and making hard decisions as in purging those who aren’t, no matter who they are?
“I love TJ Oshie and everything he's brought to this franchise and community; he's just an absolutely incredible all-world guy, everyone loves him, and the amount of heart and soul that he's shown in the last two years, with what he's put his body through – I don't know how much he has left in the tank,” May said. “I know the heart and soul will never go away, but that body has been battered and bruised. He works as hard as he can, but it gets sad at times when you know. I saw him score that empty-net goal in Philadelphia that put the Caps in the playoffs, and I thought he was near tears, that he was ready to choke up – and then his post-game press conference that night, I felt the same way. I just thought everything he did was through heart at the end of the season, because the body wasn't listening and we all know how beat up it is – and then you find out he's been playing with a broken hand, and there are so many other things that I'm sure are ailing in his body. But, if you could find and draft and create more players with an identity of a TJ Oshie, you're gonna have a pretty damn good franchise going forward.”