Barry Trotz hopes Capitals’ loss to Penguins serves as playoff wake-up call

Barry Trotz hopes that an alarm has been sounded. The Washington Capitals will have two games to demonstrate they heard it.

A 4-3 overtime loss to the Pittsburgh Penguins sent the Capitals to their third consecutive loss on Thursday night, marking their first such skid of the season.

That it occurred against the Penguins, who have now won their last eight games and 14 of their last 15, is of no consolation for the coach of a team that clinched the Presidents’ Trophy before any other team in the Eastern Conference had secured a playoff berth.

“This has got to be a pretty good wake-up call,” Trotz said afterward. “It has to be.”

The recent skid could be considered a hiccup — and even could be glossed over, considering the last two losses, by the same score in overtime, were to teams with their futures at stake. The Penguins, by virtue of their victory, clinched the No. 2 seed in the Eastern Conference and will have home-ice advantage through at least the first round of the playoffs. On Tuesday, the New York Islanders qualified for the postseason for the third time in four seasons.

Washington has now lost four of its last five games, five of its last seven, six of its last 10 and eight of its last 14. After entering the all-star break on Jan. 27 having won 35 of their first 47 games, the Capitals have won 20 of their last 33 — still a rate that would have them, over the course of a full season, in the top spot in the Eastern Conference.

There’s no doubt that the pace over the first half of the season was unsustainable; only the Montreal Canadiens, who set the record for points in the standings in the 1976-77 season — one the Capitals pursued until early March — have finished a season with a better win percentage.

Three weeks ago, defenseman Karl Alzner was asked to diagnose some of the Capitals’ issues, which, after consecutive losses on a West Coast road trip, seemed like nitpicking. That would have been the case fifteen games earlier, Alzner said, but at the time, he believed there were serious problems that needed to be addressed.

The Capitals still haven’t done that. Their slow starts — they have conceded the first goal in 42 of their 80 games and have surrendered five more goals in the first period than they have scored — are still an issue. Their puck possession and turnover rate are still problems, which in turn calls their decision-making into question, and goaltender Braden Holtby and left wing Andre Burakovsky each independently raised the issues of work ethic and desire after the loss on Thursday.

“I’m not gonna say it’s an excuse, but we’ve been kind of ready for the playoff,” Burakovsky said. “We’ve been first in the league for a while here. We clinched the playoff spot early. It might be that some guys [are] real excited to play the playoffs and forget about playing the last games here. I think that’s something we have to get rid of and start really playing well in the next two [games] here so we can be ready for what’s coming up.”

It’s not as if the Capitals’ breakdowns are gargantuan faults; rather, they’re thin cracks that have begun to spider through a seemingly solid foundation. Still, their source is hard to determine. At times during the season, Trotz has admitted that there are situations he can’t fix and has left it up to his players to do so themselves.

This stretch may be one of them. Scoring has been an issue: The Capitals’ power play, long tops in the league, has fallen to No. 3 after going 4-for-32 over the last 12 games. A number of players who are expected to find the back of the net have been unable to do so lately. At one point, Washington was scoring nearly 3.5 goals a game, but that mark is down to 3.04.

With Holtby, whose goals-against average and save percentage rank in the top 10, it’s unclear whether the pursuit of Martin Brodeur’s single-season wins record is affecting him. If it was, he wouldn’t admit it, though doing so would go against the ethos of his team-first, stats-are-irrelevant approach.

Those issues are all ones other teams would love to have, but they hover at a price. As the Capitals enter the postseason, the chatter around their recent playoff failures and their inability to advance past the second round is sure to increase.

For much of the season, players have insisted that this year’s team is different and that those letdowns are irrelevant — but they’re also keenly aware of history and fear playing into the self-fulfilling prophecy.

Collectively, their greatest hope should be that Burakovsky is right — that those who have chosen to coast through the final portion of the season will be able to turn it on when the spotlight shines again.

“We’ve had good flashes, but it’s not going to last for very long if we play like we did tonight,” Holtby said. “Hopefully, we realize that we’re a lot better team than that and we need to work. Things don’t come easy in this league.”