Washington has one season left to get this right, and the center ice is a mess

Alex Ovechkin told his teammates before he told the world, and I wrote about what that meant last week. I'm not going to repeat myself. What I want to talk about now is what happens after the ceremony — after the tributes roll in every road city, after the April 4 farewell against Pittsburgh sells for prices that would embarrass a Stanley Cup Final, after the curtain call. What happens when the lights come up on a team that has been handed the most emotionally clarifying season in franchise history, and the middle of its lineup is held together with optimism and a $23 million gamble that isn't paying off yet?

Washington clinched a playoff spot at 47-41, fifth seed in the East, and the roster is genuinely better than it was a year ago when the Capitals missed entirely. Tom Wilson has been the best player on the ice most nights — 45 points in 43 games, the team's most dangerous weapon by a considerable margin. Ovechkin has given them 40 points across 48 games, which for any other 41-year-old would be a punchline and for him is just Tuesday. Jakob Chychrun has been a revelation on the back end. The pieces exist. This is not a fraudulent contender.

But here is the declaration I am prepared to stand on: Washington will not make a serious run at a championship this spring unless someone other than Boone Jenner is driving the second-line center role, and right now that someone does not exist on this roster.

Jenner was the general manager's answer to losing Connor McMichael — a core depth center who put up 31 points in 50 games before leaving for St. Louis — and the signing looked reasonable enough on paper in July. It does not look reasonable now. Jenner is producing at a fraction of what a starting center should in this league, and the names behind him on the depth chart offer nothing to soften that concern. This is not a minor positional wrinkle. Center depth is the engine room of a playoff team, and Washington's engine room has a serious mechanical problem heading into the most meaningful season the franchise will play for a generation.

The irony is almost too neat. The Capitals spent the summer locking in their future — Ryan Leonard on an eight-year deal, Justin Sourdif on eight years — while the present quietly developed a hole at the position that most determines playoff survival. Leonard and Sourdif are legitimate pieces; I have believed in both of them all season. But neither is a center, and neither solves what Jenner hasn't. Dylan Strome is a capable top-line pivot, and Aliaksei Protas has been a pleasant contributor, but below that the production drops off a cliff. The one-goal game record — 14-18 this season — tells you exactly where that depth problem shows up. Close games in the playoffs are one-goal games. Washington has been losing them at a clip that would end most runs before the second round.

I covered the late-season surge last spring, the eight wins in ten games, the glimpse of what this group could be when it caught fire. That stretch was real. It was also a warning, because teams that find their ceiling in the final week of the regular season and call it a revelation tend to find a different ceiling in May. The 2026 Capitals were good enough to go 8-2 to close the year and still miss the playoffs. The 2026-27 Capitals are good enough to be a genuine threat — but only if the roster can hold up through four rounds of playoff hockey without a gaping void down the middle.

Here is what I think this season is: it is Ovechkin's last chance, and it is also the last time Washington gets to use him as a crutch. Every team in the Eastern Conference knows that. They will game-plan for him, crowd his space, and dare the Capitals to beat them with the second and third lines. My read is that Chris Patrick has one more move to make — not in the offseason, not eventually, but before the trade deadline — and it has to address center ice. The farewell tour deserves a real supporting cast. Right now, it has a hole where the depth should be.