LOVERRO: Time for Carbery to break out his particular set of skills

OPINION:

It was after one of their many victories this season — the Washington Capitals surprised just about everyone, even themselves, with 51 of them — when coach Spencer Carbery talked about the connection between him and his team.

He spoke with pride of watching the action unfold on the ice and feeling confident about how his players would execute what they had practiced so many times. 

Carbery was trying to share the joy he feels when the plan comes together. He beamed at the relationship he and the team had built together.

On Tuesday night, after a 2-1 overtime loss to the Carolina Hurricanes in a game that felt more like an 8-1 blowout, there was no beaming.

Carbery walked into the postgame press conference at Capital One Arena like his team had been kidnapped.

“If we sat here and went through the whole game … it wasn’t good and that’s the bottom line,” he said tersely. “Our entire team was not good.”

Trying to defend 94 shot attempts while your team could muster up just 34 for the entire game is not good. Neither is just 14 shots on goal compared to 33 for your opponent.

The offensive onslaught from Carolina in the first game of their second-round playoff series didn’t come out of the blue.

“There’s no surprises,” Carbery told reporters before the series began. “We just know the ins and outs of a lot of their systems because we play the same thing. It just becomes two teams who can do it better and who can do it more consistently for a long period of time.”

But Washington’s tepid response was certainly a surprise to Carbery. It was as if he didn’t recognize his own team.

The Capitals better hope that, like Liam Neeson, Carbery has a “very particular set of skills” to get the team he was proud of back on the ice for Game 2 Thursday night at home. 

According to his colleagues, Carbery has those skills. 

He is a finalist for the Jack Adams Trophy for NHL coach of the year, and fellow coaches sang his praises for the job he did with the Capitals this season, particularly after significant personnel changes in the offseason.

“He’s turned them into a deep, four-line juggernaut that just wins hockey games,” Tampa Bay coach Jon Cooper told the Associated Press. “They do everything right. There’s no egos on the team and he’s found a way to coach a Hall of Fame superstar and coach players that are just surviving to be in the lineup every night and he’s found a way to make it all work.”

Paul Maurice, who won the Stanley Cup last year with Florida, said Carbery “got them to play very hard.”

“Last year he came in and changed the intensity level, and now it’s systemized. If you can get your team to play hard, and then they’re learning these systems, the more time they spend doing it, the faster that they get.”

Even the opposing coach in this series, Carolina’s Rod Brind’Amour, said he has been impressed with Carbery’s results. “From Day 1, he put in a system that wins hockey games,” he said before the series began.

But treating the opponent’s zone as if it were a COVID colony won’t win you hockey games, no matter what system you put in.

Perhaps the only time Carbery didn’t spit his words out in the postgame press conference Tuesday night was when someone asked about the performance of goalie Logan Thompson, who had 31 saves.

“I thought he was fantastic,” Carbery said.

He was, as he was for much of the season and through the first round of the playoffs against Montreal. 

Washington has one of the key ingredients for postseason success — a hot goalie. It’s Carbery’s job to make sure those fantastic performances don’t go to waste.

A second-round exit, despite, as Carbery referred to it, getting “over the hump” of getting out of the first round against Montreal after five failures to advance since the Capitals won the Stanley Cup in 2018, isn’t going to cut it, despite Carolina actually being the favorite going into this series.

It will leave the Cup further in the rear-view mirror and become another missed opportunity to have franchise results match the presence of the greatest goal scorer in the history of the league, Alex Ovechkin.

Washington needs Carbery to be Liam Neeson and get his team back. 

• Catch Thom Loverro on “The Kevin Sheehan Show” podcast.