Dobber’s Offseason Fantasy Grades: Washington Capitals

For the last 23 years (13 with The Hockey News) Dobber and his team have reviewed each team from a fantasy-hockey standpoint and graded them. The 24th annual review will appear here on DobberHockey throughout the summer. This is not a review of the likely performance on the ice or in the standings, but in the realm of fantasy hockey both for the season ahead as well as the foreseeable future. Offensively, will the team perform? Are there plenty of depth options worthy of owning in keeper leagues? What about over the next two or three years? These questions are what I take into consideration when looking at the depth chart and the player potential on that depth chart.

Gone: Connor McMichael, Brandon Duhaime, Hendrix Lapierre, Trevor van Riemsdyk, David Kampf, Sonny Milano, Declan Chisholm, Brett Leason, Bogdan Trineyev

Incoming: Jordan Kyrou, Alex Tuch, Boone Jenner, Vincent Desharnais, Jonny Brodzinski, Josh Dunne

Impact of Changes:

Washington finished 43-30-9 for 95 points and still missed the playoffs, since every Eastern qualifier reached 98, and the front office answered by buying forwards. Kyrou arrived from St. Louis for McMichael, prospect Milton Gastrin and the 16th overall pick, and Tuch came from Buffalo for Kampf and a third-rounder before signing an extension (8 yr, $10.5M AAV). Add Jenner in free agency and the arrivals carried 188 points of last season’s production while the nine offseason departures took 106, a net of roughly 80 points of offense a team that missed the cut by three could have used. On paper this is now one of the deepest top-nine forward groups in the league, three scoring lines deep with McMichael’s 46 points the only real production lost. Kyrou’s 46 points were a four-year low after seasons of 73, 67 and 70, but the underlying season says buy: he shot a career-low 10.4 percent against a 13-to-15 percent career range, had a minor knee procedure after the season and is ready for camp, and put up 29 points over his final 37 games once St. Louis settled his line. The Fantasy Guide projects him right back at 32 goals and 62 points.

The blue line was quieter. John Carlson was traded to Anaheim in March and the only outside addition was Desharnais (4 yr, $4.2M AAV), a stay-at-home type, so the offensive help arrives from within: Cole Hutson steps in as the power-play quarterback of the future, and Rasmus Sandin‘s ACL surgery (he will miss a decent chunk of the season) clears even more runway for him. The power play needs the help. Washington finished 24th in efficiency, and per the Fantasy Guide, Ovechkin factored in on only 46.3 percent of its goals while playing 91.6 percent of its minutes, so there is fixable inefficiency on top of the two skilled forwards and a real quarterback now joining the units. In goal, Washington allowed just 2.90 goals per game, seventh in the league, behind a defense that returns as-is. The Caps also sit close to the cap ceiling, so there is no wiggle room for more players or extra cap.

Ready for Full Time: Cole Hutson, Ilya Protas, Ivan Miroshnichenko

Ryan Leonard and Justin Sourdif both played full seasons in 2025-26, so the graduates this time come from Hershey, and it is a strong class.

Cole Hutson is the headliner. He joined the Capitals out of Boston University in March and put up 10 points in 14 games while averaging 17:27, production that moved him to number one among defensemen in the Fantasy Prospects Report. The comparison that follows him around is his brother Lane, and the offensive instincts are genuinely similar. The complication is Jakob Chychrun, who opens on the first power play on proven skill and experience, though Hutson can take the job outright if he shows he is the better quarterback, which would let Chychrun focus on the five-on-five offense he excels at. Draft Hutson in every dynasty format; in single-season leagues he is a late-round flier with top-pair upside by spring.

Ilya Protas may be the best forward prospect nobody drafted last summer. The younger Protas led Hershey and all AHL rookies with 66 points in 69 games, won the league’s Rookie of the Year award, and added four points in a four-game NHL cameo. At 6-6 he draws Tage Thompson comparisons, and a middle-six role with secondary power-play time is there for the taking.

Ivan Miroshnichenko gets one more shot at the label. He was buried behind veterans and averaged under 10 minutes across 13 NHL games, but he produced 34 points in 41 AHL games and his new two-year one-way contract says the organization expects him to stick. The shot has always been the selling point; a 15-goal season in a fourth-line role is the realistic floor.

Andrew Cristall belongs in the cups-of-coffee tier. He scored 60 points in 72 games as an AHL rookie and led the Bears in playoff scoring, but the forward group ahead of him is now so crowded that a full-time job probably waits until 2027-28. In dynasty leagues, that makes this the last cheap summer to acquire him.

Fantasy Outlook

The team-level picture is friendlier than a 95-point miss suggests. The Fantasy Guide projects Washington as the league’s top goals-for team at 307, a 44-goal jump, and unlike recent teams that crashed after riding percentages, last season’s offense was not running hot: Washington sat middle of the pack in both shooting percentage and shot volume. The luck lives at the player level instead. Wilson has shot 19.5 and 19.6 percent in back-to-back years, so his 30-goal pace leans on a percentage few forwards hold for a third season; Strome already paid his regression tax, falling from 19.5 to 13.3 percent and still reaching 58 points; and Chychrun has been above 11 percent in consecutive years on 221 shots, unusually high for a defenseman even in a sheltered offensive role.

The Guide spreads the projections wide rather than high: Strome 71 points, Kyrou 62, Aliaksei Protas 59, Wilson 59 with 120 PIM, Chychrun 56, Tuch 55, Ovechkin 55. Ovechkin is the boom-or-bust name for his age-41 season; his 2.7 points per 60 was his second-lowest in 14 tracked years, and the Guide’s camp note warns that a year built around him chasing 35 goals with full power-play time comes at the expense of everyone else on the unit. Leonard is both the Guide’s breakout radar pick (a 70-point sleeper tag at 20 percent) and a stock drop, because the offseason shopping pushes him down the lineup; both can be true at once, which captures the single-season problem with this roster. Tuch brings 33 goals, 195 shots and 90 blocks, fourth among forwards last season, an across-the-board line that carries multi-category teams. Pierre-Luc Dubois is the swing piece: abdominal surgery in November cost him 52 games and he finished the year playing on a broken hand, so his 19 points say little, and a healthy Dubois is a 55-point center acquired at a steep discount. Boone Jenner (147 hits) and Desharnais (103) restock the physical categories that left with Duhaime and Nic Dowd, and head-to-head owners should note the Guide gives Washington the most light days in the league and the best playoff-week schedule, 15 games from March 15 to April 10 with four in each of the final three weeks.

Last year’s crease timeshare is resolved. Thompson made 58 starts to Lindgren’s 20, won 31, and his 39 quality starts trailed only Vasilevskiy; the Guide calls him a 99 percent lock as the starter and projects 58 games, 33 wins and a 2.50 goals-against average, which is why he sits eighth among goalies on the Dobber draft list. Lindgren was shut down late with an upper-body injury and finished at .879, so the handcuff comes cheap.

The two-year view is where Washington gets interesting for keeper owners. Protas, Cristall, Hutson, Leonard and Sourdif form one of the better young pipelines attached to a win-now roster, Tuch is signed through 2034, and Thompson’s contract runs four more seasons. On draft day the shape mirrors the roster: no Capital cracks the top 50 skaters on the Dobber draft list, but ten sit between Strome at 61 and Cole Hutson at 167, half a lineup’s worth of middle-round value with no first-round anchor. The remaining risks are the thin defense behind Chychrun for fantasy purposes and a cap sheet with no room to patch anything in-season. Teams this capped-out usually need their rookies to outperform their contracts, which is exactly what the Hershey group is positioned to do.

Fantasy Grade: B+ (last year was B)