To win consecutive Cups, Caps want a good start

BOSTON — The Washington Capitals have heard all about the potential pitfalls for the defending Stanley Cup champions: a slow start to the National Hockey League season, fatigue from such a long playoff run and greater injury risk because of a short summer to both recover and train.

Defenceman Brooks Orpik, the only Washington player who’d actually won a championship before this past one, would advise his teammates to largely ignore those warnings.

“You hear a lot of people trying to tell you that you should feel a lot more tired than you actually are, so I think if you let that creep in, you can trick yourself into feeling it,” said Orpik, who also won the Cup in 2009 with the Pittsburgh Penguins.

The Capitals opened their pre-season schedule Sunday afternoon in Boston, just three days into the on-ice portion of training camp. Washington travelled with just five players who played in the Stanley Cup final series against the Vegas Golden Knights, and half of the Bruins’ roster was in China for an exhibition series against Calgary. The Capitals lost in a shootout, 2-1.

Training camp and pre-season action is a harsh comedown after hoisting the Stanley Cup on the ice just three months ago, but the Capitals are already wary of the traps into which past defending champions have fallen as they begin their bid to repeat.

“It’s no secret that that sometimes happens — you go from playing on the biggest stage, you play the biggest game in your life and then you have an off-season and then it’s game 1 again,” forward Tom Wilson said. “We’re all human, that’s normal. But I think, with our group, no matter what, whether it’s the last game of the Stanley Cup, or game 1, we love to win. That’s what separates us. We’ve had that mentality the last couple of years.”

After winning consecutive titles, the Penguins struggled during the first half of last season and were one point out of the playoffs through 41 games. They recovered with a strong second half, but the post-season isn’t always a given for the defending Stanley Cup champion. The Los Angeles Kings won in 2014 and missed the playoffs the next year. Pittsburgh’s recent repeat made them the first team to pull that off in 20 years. Part of the difficulty is that opponents will use games against the reigning Cup-winner as a measuring stick.

“I was thinking to myself a couple weeks ago that we’ve got to realize that everything is going to be tougher to start and all the games are going to be tougher against us,” centre Nicklas Backstrom said. “We better play our best hockey to start, that’s reality. But, at the same time, you feel like a whole season, 82-game season, you have your ups and downs. But it’s always important to have a good start.”

Orpik returned to Washington for informal skates ahead of training camp on Labour Day and was “pleasantly surprised” that so many of his teammates were already back and in “pretty good” conditioning. “I thought coming off this summer that everybody would be coming in kind of last second, but guys got genuinely excited to get back it.”

Though the Capitals are returning all but two players from their Stanley Cup final lineup and the systems are expected to stay largely the same under new coach Todd Reirden, Orpik said the attention to detail within that team structure was emphasized in day 1 of training camp video sessions. Washington wants to start the season very much the same way it ended the last one.