from Isabelle Khurshudyan of The Washington Post,

“I’m pretty content with the core,” MacLellan said Monday. “I think the ninth, 10th forward are where we’re going to look to improve.”

The Capitals won’t have room to do much else, and the success of the regular season shouldn’t be completely ignored either. Just three players are unrestricted free agents: forwards Jason Chimera and Mike Richards and defenseman Mike Weber. MacLellan said he’ll prioritize re-signing the team’s four restricted free agents — Marcus Johansson, Dmitry Orlov, Tom Wilson and Michael Latta — before considering whether the unrestricted ones have a place next season.

But in identifying how a largely successful team needs to improve, MacLellan pointed to the bottom half of the forward corps as needing “a little work,” specifically in becoming more offensively reliable.

“You know, we’ve talked about it: It’s turned into a top-nine league,” MacLellan said. “I don’t know that we had a pure top nine. Maybe we had a top eight or a top seven-and-a-half or however you want to value that, but I think we were a little short on the top nine.

“I think you need two-way guys, guys who can play both ways. Ideally for us, I think we need some offense out of it.”

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