If the capitals lose to the islanders, changes are likely to come. But what, is debatable.

The Washington Capitals are 3-0 to the New York Islanders and could soar again Tuesday night, ending with a season that began with so much promise. It would mark the second consecutive first round for Todd Reirden ‘s capitals of Washington.

The emerging storyline goes like this: Barry Trotz is out-coaching Todd Reirden. The former Stanley Cup champion head coach of the Capitals, who led the Caps to the Promised Land in 2018 and then abruptly left the team, takes his former assistant to school with superior hockey power and experience.

I’m not sure I do buy it completely. Barry is still the second most losing coach in NHL history and once he scraped Nate Schmidt for Mike Weber in a playoff game. But I’m also not sure I could convince you not to believe it.

However, this beatdown has been so profound that changes, often major changes, need to be made, as it is clear that this [gestures broadly at everything] does not work.

The capitals are more talented and experienced than the islanders, but the capitals are still pummeled at 5v5. In addition to exemplary performances by Alex Ovechkin and Braden Holtby, the Caps have seen an empty shell of themselves. They seem to be playing content on the perimeter and trying to puck five passing boys into the offensive zone. Finally, the performance, motivation and condition of the players fall on the head coach and the rest of the coaching staff. They are the leaders. The book stops by her.

That’s why, if there is a mandate to make big changes, Todd Reirden will be the first. Unless the Capitals can do what only four other teams in NHL history have done – dig themselves out of a 3-0 hole and win a series – Reirden will likely be out by the end of this season.

Past history does not simply suggest the shooting of Reirden; it guarantees it pure.

Every coach hired by Capitals since 1981 who did not win a playoff series in their first two seasons did not come to coach in a third except for Glen Hanlon (who was in a rematch).

– Ted Starkey (@TedStarkey) August 17, 2020

As Peter wrote earlier today:

[H]ead coach Todd Reirden is both responsible and accountable for it all. If defensive coach Reid Cashman was the problem, the chance to replace him went down two months ago. If systems were the problem, he had 160 games to make adjustments. If motivation was the problem, then he becomes less likely to find the right sequence of words to speak in the right volume with the right intonation to go through them.

Winning is magic. Winning frees coaches from their failures and erases the murmur of “he lost the room.” If the Caps had won an undeserved win in Game Three, all these figures would have been thrown in a different light.

Dismissing Todd Reirden is an easy solution. It would be an injection of hope for the fanbase. But the team’s playing core is up for contract in the long run, and the team has already committed to keep Alex Ovechkin for the rest of his career. The most substantial part of this team is going nowhere.

But what if the Caps dismiss Reirden and then discover that the real problems remain. What if there’s something systematically wrong here, and coaches change, just change the salad dressing on a bed of rotting lettuce (except you, Ovi, you, my dear, are the very tasty baby grains in it).

A few questions:

What if Reirden is a good coach? What if it’s Reirden vs. Trotz story what is too complicated to simplify? For example, every statistic you see, other than playoff performance, suggests that Reirden is good.

• Todd’s career record is 89-46-16. Reirden’s .642 points percentage ranks fifth in NHL history among coaches with at least 100 games.
• The Capitals won the Metropolitan Division in both seasons.
• Reirden is the third coach in NHL history to earn an All-Star nod in his first two seasons as head coach.
• The Reirden Capitals had almost the same record in the regular season in 2018-19 (48-26-8) as the Trotz Caps in 2017-18 (49-26-7). And Reirden was on track this season, going through 69 fun games (41-20-8) to break or break that record.
• Alex Ovechkin has, despite aging, gotten even better under Reirden’s leadership and has had 99 goals in the last two seasons.
• John Carlson is the favorite for the Norris Trophy.
• This is an opinion, but Reirden’s lines always made sense to me. There have been no root scraps of talented young players like Jakub Vrana.
• I’m also not sure if I mentioned this earlier, but Todd never approached Nate Schmidt in a playoff game for Mike Weber.

Oh no, I embedded the video.

Yup, there’s Mike Weber deflating a puck straight to Patric Hornqvist for the game’s winning overtime goal after I begged Barry not to play him earlier that day.

Then there’s this: What if the Capitals’ horrific performance in the playoffs is completely random? What if the unusual five-month layoff due to the coronavirus pandemic and the 24-team playoff format, which gave the capitals later major games than the islanders, gave the islands an advantage?

• The Islanders immediately had to play good hockey to advance, and defeated the Florida Panthers three games to one in the qualifying round.
• After John Carlson lost to an injury in the exposition game, the Capitals seem to control their effort, intentionally or unintentionally, during their three round-robin games.
• It is unclear how well-formed Capitals players were able to stay during the pandemic.
• The team is playing in a bubble away from their families and friends. It is unclear what the emotional toll is for certain players.

How much we need to make of this year’s playoff disaster is up for debate.

I think the way we evaluate Reirden is colored by how things ended with Trotz as well: winning the Stanley Cup. No matter what shortcomings Trotz had as a coach (he entered the season as a lame duck and was sacked almost several times during the season), they were eliminated when he led the team to the first championship. We will always love him.

When Trotz went to greener pastures (and I mean, greener) in New York, Reirden, his native, got the chance to become an NHL head coach for the first time. But with that opportunity came the irreversible task of trying to improve on the virtually un-improvable: winning the Stanley Cup. I think you could win a championship goodness and more in-depth alike?

Reirden’s expectations were sky high, while Trotz, when he first joined the Capitals organization, were low: just coming back in the playoffs after Adam Oates ruined the joint.

All of this is to say that from the outside, I think we are unfairly criticizing Todd’s performance as head coach of the team. Does this mean he should get a chance to coach the team next year if the team is swept? I do not know.

There may be issues with this team, despite the coach:

• Evgeny Kuznetsov is signed through 2025 with a $ 7.8 million cap hit. He’s not a good player at five-on-five and struggles to make his linemen better with consistency. Kuznetsov no longer seems to respond to Todd Reirden. In Game Three, which Reirden defines as “the biggest of the year,” Kuzy saw his first period stat line.

Evgeny Kuznetsov: 5:18 5v5 TOI, 0 / -8 CF, 0 / -7 shots, 0 / -1 goals, 0 / -6 SCF, 0 / -5 HDCF

– Chris Cerullo (@ CJC_95) August 16, 2020

• The capitals are a hodgepodge of different styles (speed, skill, physical), making a monolingual identity as a single, all-purpose system difficult. Barry Trotz tweaked the Capitals defense coverage late in 2018, which required the talented team to sit back more and have only five boys at the top of the puck. The team completely bought in for the more defensive system and rode the wave to the Stanley Cup.
• The capitals just don’t have a third line scoring like they used to. The depth of the team is not as strong as it used to be.

If the capitals end up losing to the Islanders, which at this point is almost a statistical guarantee, the offseason this fall will be crucial in determining if more Cups will be won during the Alex Ovechkin Era. Since winning everything in 2018, the Capitals have still won as they once did in the regular season, but they have failed to find the next level in the playoffs. They seem less hungry.

It will be difficult to aggressively change the roster with a flat salary cap. That perhaps changing coaches is the most aggressive thing they can do. All I ask is that if they fire Reirden, then not talk about him like he was bad at his job. Maybe it’s time for us to be more skeptical about the roster.

Main photo: Elizabeth Kong / RMNB