Capitals enter make-or-break stretch needing ‘to get a lot better’

For long stretches of this season, the Washington Capitals were stealing games. The term “character win” came up regularly as they somehow held strong while being outshot and outplayed to prevail — perhaps more often than they should have.

In the six games before the NHL’s Christmas break, Washington went 3-1-2, and only one of those games — a 3-1 defeat at the Nashville Predators on Dec. 16 — was decided by more than one goal. The Capitals knew they were walking a dangerous path, but they were still picking up points along the way.

In Washington’s six games since the break, the season has taken an ugly turn. Washington is 1-4-1 while being outscored by 15 goals; the Capitals’ goal differential this season has fallen to minus-24, second worst in the Eastern Conference entering Saturday.

In their lone win of this stretch, 4-3 at the Pittsburgh Penguins on Tuesday, the Capitals grabbed a 4-0 lead in the first period and nearly blew it. The next night, they allowed a go-ahead goal to the visiting New Jersey Devils just 46 seconds after defenseman John Carlson tied the score, eventually losing, 6-3. And they let a 2-0 lead evaporate in an awful 6-2 loss to the Carolina Hurricanes on Friday at Capital One Arena.

“Just game-flow-wise, similar to the last game,” Carlson said Friday night. “That’s what makes it frustrating. Not only did we talk about it and go over it and make a point about it, it happened again. … Whether we’ve got our A stuff and we’re dominating or we’re playing okay or we’re playing terrible, we’ve got to find a way to garner momentum. It seems like we just come up short every time on those big plays. … It’s made every game a grind right until the end, even when we’re playing decent and winning games. We’ve got to find that whatever you want to call it — killer instinct.”

Capitals’ Tom Wilson is named to the NHL All-Star Game

Coach Spencer Carbery expressed as much frustration with his team Friday as he has shown at any point this season, emphatically stating the Capitals have “a lot of growing to do.”

Every skater but defenseman Rasmus Sandin, who is out with an illness, and captain Alex Ovechkin, who took a maintenance day after an awkward collision late in Friday’s loss, was on the ice at least 15 minutes before practice officially began Saturday, working with the assistant coaches. Practice itself was spirited, with a heavy dose of battle drills aimed at getting Washington back on track.

“We just have to get better,” Carbery said Saturday. “… Not only collectively as a team inside of our structure but individually, we’ve got to get better and we’ve got to work to get to those spots. We can’t just say it and just snap your fingers and think that all of a sudden your game’s going to get to a good spot. We’ve got to get to work.”

With 10 games remaining until the all-star break, the next several weeks have the makings of a make-or-break stretch for the Capitals (18-13-6). A Sunday afternoon matchup with the visiting Los Angeles Kings — who were on the losing end of one of those games Washington stole earlier in the season — is followed by a Thursday game against the Seattle Kraken, which hasn’t lost in regulation in 10 games (8-0-2), and then a back-to-back next weekend with the New York Rangers, who handed the Capitals a 5-1 loss to start this skid.

“These are all games where you’re getting tested against the elite teams in the league,” Carbery said. “At the end of the month, we’ll know a lot about our group and where we stand and where we go from there.”

The way Washington has played since the break suggests this stretch is more likely to break its playoff hopes than make them. Washington entered Saturday just two points out of the second wild-card spot in the East, but it had fallen to seventh in the Metropolitan Division.

The Capitals’ defense and goaltending, which kept them above water earlier in the season, have slipped, and the offense hasn’t produced nearly enough to overcome anything less than elite play on the other end of the ice. Goaltender Charlie Lindgren’s upper-body injury hasn’t helped, but the underlying numbers indicate Washington was due for a few results similar to what it has posted over the past six games.

Capitals’ Ethan Bear ‘felt all of it’ in his return to the NHL

“I look at it through the process of what we’re doing,” Carbery said. “We’ve got to get a lot better at managing the puck. We’ve got to get a lot better at being able to create some things off the forecheck, sustain some pressure [offensive zone]-wise, pucks to the interior, being able to exit our zone consistently, which I thought we did a good job of for the most part [Friday] night. Then we’ll have two or three or four hiccups that are really big mistakes in those moments.

“There’s a lot of areas of our five-on-five game that we’ve got to get right, and we’re being pushed to the limit by really quality teams right now.”