According to Tarik El-Bashir of The Athletic, the Washington Capitals are making offseason and trade deadline plans as though they’ll be playing the entire 2022-23 regular season without 34-year-old forward Nicklas Backstrom. A star for the Capitals, his $9.2 million will go on LTIR and likely not come back until the postseason where his cap hit won’t count against the team’s roster.
This creates quite the opportunity for the Capitals and solves any cap concerns they had this summer. Currently over the cap ceiling of $82.5 million by approximately $6.2 million, his cap hit coming off the books means the team won’t have to dump a player. It also means the Capitals will have somewhere in the range of $3 million prior to the NHL Trade Deadline to add a valuable piece to help them in a playoff push.
It is not a guarantee that Backstrom will be ready for the playoffs, but there’s also some thinking about what the Capitals will do if he’s ready just before the postseason. Keeping in mind the Caps would have to get back under the salary cap to put him on their roster once healthy, El-Bashir writes:
If Backstrom is able to return next season — and let’s be honest, that feels like a huge “if” at this point — it would create an immediate logjam at center, assuming Evgeny Kuznetsov, Dylan Strome, Lars Eller and Nic Dowd are all healthy. So that’s probably where GM Brian MacLellan would likely look to create room.
The more likely scenario is that the Capitals won’t have access to Backstrom for the 82-game season and will look to add a big-time rental prior to the NHL Trade Deadline. Pending free agents include Jonathan Toews, Patrick Kane, Ryan O’Reilly, Vladimir Tarasenko, John Klingberg, Max Pacioretty, David Pastrnak, Dylan Larkin, and others. All of these teams where these teams will play this season are fringe playoff teams, with the exception of maybe the Carolina Hurricanes and St. Louis Blues.
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