Even as Alex Ovechkin, John Carlson and the rest of the Washington Capitals soaked in the champagne-fueled Stanley Cup revelry in 2018, it was reasonable to expect that time would soon tear their team apart.
Ovechkin was about to turn 33, an age at which many players start a steep, aging-induced decline. Carlson was scheduled to become an unrestricted free agent. Core pieces like Nicklas Backstrom and T.J. Oshie were approaching the wrong side of 30. And everyone who needed a contract, including Carlson and breakthrough playoff performers like RFA Tom Wilson, had earned raises befitting Cup champions.
Whether it was age or money, something was going to sink the Capitals and it seemed like there was no way around it. By 2023, Washington missed the playoffs and its decline was an accepted truth. “Washington is in decline,” we’d already written in 2020, making reference to the Capitals’ “inevitable demise.” In 2023, we classified them as bottom-feeders, and we weren’t alone in that. Season previews indicated it was hard to see the Capitals as a playoff team, citing missed opportunities to aggressively retool the roster.
But this is the story of how Capitals management, first led by Brian MacLellan and now by Chris Patrick, defied expectations.
“We’re not naive to the fact that as guys get older, it gets harder in this league. They’re great players but it’s going to get harder,” Patrick told The Athletic.
A deep, wide-ranging conversation with Patrick reveals that Washington’s unique accomplishment is the result of unique collaboration. The Capitals’ pro scouting department (led by Brian Sutherby) and analytics team (led by assistant general manager Tim Barnes and director of analytics H.T. Lenz) are integrated, without siloing and with direct communication between departments. This is not a case of analytics staff filing a report, hoping it gets read by somebody someday, or a scouting staff afraid to dig into the numbers that project a player’s ability. It is the norm for analytics staff and scouts to seek each other out, arranging sit-down meetings to argue their cases about their own players and players the Capitals might acquire. “What do you see that I don’t?” is a common question.
“They respect each other and they want to learn,” Patrick said. “On the analytics side, they want to hear what the scouts see. ‘What are you seeing in this guy?’ Our scouts want to understand, ‘Why does our analytics team like this guy?’ based on what they do. It’s a healthy debate.”
Communication is only the tip of the iceberg in Washington, where there are other lessons to learn when it comes to avoiding “inevitable” rebuilds.
The Capitals’ 18-11-4 record does depend, in part, on Ovechkin — but a unique approach to team building has helped Washington get younger, keep a ton of its own draft capital and frequently buy low on top-end talent.
Washington added No. 1 goaltender Logan Thompson, No. 1 defenseman Jakob Chychrun and No. 2 center Pierre-Luc Dubois without giving up a first- or second-round draft pick. They’ve made seven of their last eight first-round picks.
Thus, a top-10 team in the standings also has a top-10 prospect pool, according to Scott Wheeler’s 2025 rankings. The Capitals also placed nine players on Corey Pronman’s ranking of the top players under 23 years old.
So how did the Capitals get this close to the end of the Ovechkin era, whenever it comes, without ever needing a true rebuild?
1. Looking where other teams don’t
The Capitals’ transactional highlight reel is well established. They acquired Dubois in 2024 for goaltender Darcy Kuemper after the Kings had paid Gabriel Vilardi, Alex Iafallo, Rasmus Kupari and a second-round pick to acquire him one year before that. Ten days later, the Capitals got Thompson from the Golden Knights for two third-round picks.
It’s not that Kuemper hasn’t been good in Los Angeles. He’s fifth in goals saved above expected since joining the Kings, carrying a .920 save percentage across two years with his new team. It’s that the Capitals have a comparable goalie in Thompson — who’s third in GSAx in that same time period — and a second-line center that the league seemed to have given up on in Dubois.
And the third-round picks?
One was the Capitals’ own pick. The other was one of two draft picks Washington got from the Toronto Maple Leafs in 2024 by trading veteran defenceman Joel Edmundson. (The Capitals also got a fifth-round pick from Toronto, which they eventually used to reacquire Lars Eller.)
So the Capitals picked up a No. 1 goalie, a No. 2 center and a depth forward for a No. 1 goalie and a third-round pick.
They got their No. 1 center Dylan Strome for an even better acquisition price in 2022 — free. Washington took a chance on Strome, then 25, after the Chicago Blackhawks decided not to give him a qualifying offer, signing him to a one-year, $3.5 million deal. He’s scored 237 points in 276 games for the Capitals since then.
Let’s take a look at the Capitals’ top six forwards, top four defensemen and No. 1 goaltender through the lens of acquisition cost.
Forwards
PlayerRoleAcquiredDetails
1LW
Draft
1st, 2004
1C
UFA
Chicago did not qualify
1RW
Draft
16th, 2012
2LW
Draft
91st, 2019
2C
Trade
Darcy Kuemper
2LW
Draft
25th, 2019
A franchise player at No. 1 overall, three picks outside the top 10, a buy-low trade, and a UFA signing of a player whose previous team gave up on him.
The trend continues on defense and in goal.
Defence and Goaltending
PlayerRoleAcquiredDetails
1D
Trade
Nick Jensen, 2026 third
2D
Draft
27th, 2008
3D
UFA
6 years, $5.75 million AAV, 2024
4D
Trade
Erik Gustafsson, 2023 first (28th)
1G
Trade
2024 and 2025 thirds
Finally, the Capitals moved a first-round pick — except not their own. It originally belonged to the Bruins but was part of a creative three-team trade wherein Washington sent out top-four defenseman Dmitry Orlov and depth forward Garnet Hathaway and received first-, second- and third-round picks from Boston.
Overall, the Capitals’ top four defencemen are Carlson, who they drafted back in 2008, and a series of players acquired without sacrificing their own first-round picks. Martin Fehervary, a 2018 second-round pick, sometimes slots into the top four, but the trend is clear: Ovechkin (40) and Carlson (35) may be freaks of nature, performing as they do at their age, but the Capitals have otherwise retooled their top six forwards, top four defensemen and top goaltender at very little cost to their own team.
If you like to geek out over transactions, this is where it gets even more interesting.
2. What does arbitrage even mean?
Washington’s staff is unique in its background. In addition to bona fides as hockey people, the Capitals’ front office is full of people with a background in finance.
President of hockey operations Brian MacLellan has an MBA in finance and worked for an investment consulting firm in Minneapolis before joining the Capitals as a pro scout. General manager Chris Patrick has an MBA in finance, too, and worked in investment banking and private equity before joining the Capitals’ player development. Barnes was a hockey analytics pioneer in the public sphere while working as an equity derivatives trader.
Not every hockey team would hire a financial trader to such an important analytical role, as the Capitals did with Barnes in 2014-15. There is a perfect storm of sorts, with MacLellan and Patrick sharing a portion of Barnes’ trading background.
It pays off for Washington in the form of a story that makes Patrick chuckle and which reveals their approach to “arbitrage” — a trading term which refers to the simultaneous buying and selling of assets, to take advantage of markets which offer different prices for the same asset.
Back when MacLellan was GM and Barnes was still a new hire, MacLellan brought a potential deal to Washington’s hockey operations staff. Remember that the Capitals don’t separate their pro scouts from analytics, so people of all sorts of different backgrounds were in the room as he detailed the theoretical acquisition.
“Tim, right away, goes to one of our scouts and says, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’” Patrick says. “The scout just looks at him. Then Barnesy goes into this 10-minute, very nuanced concept of trading for this guy, getting this guy, using terms like ‘arbitrage’ — all of these big trading terms — and the scout’s looking at him like he has no idea what he’s talking about … But Barny started with, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’”
At this, Patrick pauses to laugh. “We’ll still say that sometimes, when there’s some sort of difficult or complicated concept. We’ll look at each other and go, ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’”
Back to arbitrage. One of the Capitals’ most frequent trading trends is to protect their first- and second-round picks, making their deals using mid-round picks instead. The other is making multiple incremental trades to increase the value of their assets one step at a time.
How do the Capitals always seem to have draft picks to work with? Pay attention to their trade trees and you will find several examples. They traded a third-round pick and a seventh-round pick to Montreal for Edmundson, for example, before getting a third-round pick and a fifth-round pick back for him from Toronto.
That’s a small upgrade in assets and it took salary retention to accomplish, but rewind just a tiny bit: Washington could afford to send Minnesota’s third-round pick to Montreal because it acquired that pick for Marcus Johansson in 2023 — the year MacLellan, Patrick, Barnes and company realized they were missing the playoffs and struck early to acquire assets.
A full scraping of the Capitals’ transaction history at PuckPedia reveals several trades involving mid-to-lower-tier veterans for mid-round draft picks — and subsequent trades of those picks for players who ultimately go on to benefit the Capitals.
“I think that’s something that Tim and our analytics staff does really well,” Patrick said. “He views this like a market, not unlike a trading market. As markets evolve, they learn from each other and they get smarter. Areas where you have the ability to earn profit go away because everybody starts doing it. Then you’ve got to find new areas. And that’s Tim’s whole thing.”
Washington’s ability to read and react to trading markets has helped it navigate toward the end of the Ovechkin era in top form. It’s taking that same philosophy to the nature of the Ovechkin era itself.
The team has responded as Backstrom, Oshie, and other key veterans have aged out and moved on. For Ovechkin and Carlson, who continue to deliver results, it’s adapted, building a deep team around them through winning more trades than it loses. The combination of Patrick’s human approach, Barnes’ analytics and an entire front office that communicates has honed the Capitals’ approach to the UFA market, trading, and professional and amateur scouting, too.
“We need to be a strong team, top to bottom,” Patrick said. “We can’t have liabilities on our non-Ovechkin lines and try to get away with it, so I think we’ve worked really hard to make sure there aren’t a lot of holes in our lineup anywhere.
“We need to keep building here for the post-Ovechkin era, whenever that is.”
