Seems a bit dire to have them behind the likes of CGY, SEA, MTL, STL currently. Or that their future prospects are ahead of only one team in the league. The Caps are an easy team to write off...Dom has been doing it for about five years now. Plenty of regression is presumably expected based off of their goal differential, reliance on Lindgren, etc. But they did make some pretty big changes, mostly on the back-end where I expect the process to be fundamentally improved. They may still suffer from their fair share of Big Mistakes and their lack of dominant talent up front may provide little margin most nights. But they're likely to be scrappy. Ovechkin's highly likely to be motivated from the start and they do have a lot of players with something to prove. Going forward their management team isn't bottom tier. They'll have cap space to work with. They need a legit franchise talent post-Ovi to be sure but ranking their future that poorly seems at odds with prospect rankings that haven't been rated that poor for a few years.
Ovechkin will be determined from the outset I think. Strome should have slightly more in him. Roy should be the closest thing to Niskanen they've had. I'm really not sure about Mangiapane on the top line or whether there's too credible an alternative outside of perhaps Wilson. We'll see just how much they can get out of PLD. Chychrun to me is the big key in bumping them up more firmly into contention if he's at his best. He's got so much upside if his defensive game gets buttoned up. They definitely still need a playdriving headliner. Perhaps Leonard and Cristall combined can help steer that where it needs to be, albeit from the wing. C/D high-end play remains a big question mark going forward but consider me an optimist compared to that ranking. And if things truly do get so dire I doubt mgmt. will sit idly by (like some teams) and just accept defeat as so many teams have seemingly for a very long time.
