The Capitals’ coaching search is still underway, now more than three weeks after the team parted ways with Peter Laviolette and GM Brian MacLellan said he was “more open-minded” to hiring a first-time head coach.
But, with eight teams still in the Stanley Cup Playoffs, there are still quite a few possible assistants whose names still out of play until their current teams are eliminated, perhaps all the way up to the end of the Stanley Cup Finals in mid-June.
And as such, when MacLellan talked to NBC Sports Washington on Tuesday, he said that the search is still, in essence, at its start.
“We’re just beginning,” MacLellan told NBC Sports Washington. “There’s a lot of teams still playing. There’s a lot of guys we want to talk to. So, we’ll monitor the playoffs, see what happens in the playoffs. We have targeted a few guys and we’ll bring them in. We’ll talk to them and then we’ll kind of go from there, make a plan from there.”
The new league year begins July 1, so if at least one of those potential candidates ends up in the finals, the Caps may only have a couple of weeks to try to talk to them – assuming the vacancy still exists – before free agency kicks off.
The team has already extended some players and signed last year’s first-round pick, Ivan Miroshnichenko, after his KHL contract was terminated, so they’ve been busy on the personnel front, and they retained the No. 8 overall pick in the June 28 NHL Entry Draft after Monday’s lottery as well.
That’s all on MacLellan, but he’ll also have to try to find a coach who can bring in a system that fits those players and everyone else staying in DC from last year, as well as whomever he may add after July 1.
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