from Matt Larkin of The Hockey News,

The 2017-18 Washington Capitals were big, strong, mean, talented and hungry.

The 2019-20 Washington Capitals, in their season-ending Game 5 loss to the New York Islanders, looked slow, sluggish and, well, disinterested. In Thursday’s defeat, the Caps iced 10 players from the 2017-18 Stanley Cup team, but the group barely resembled the champions of two years ago. The Caps mustered 21 shots in a do-or-die game. They couldn’t get to the net all series, either. In 5-on-5 play, the Isles, not known for their offense, doubled Washington in high-danger shot attempts, 48-24.

“The league is too good – If you’re not physically engaged and mentally on top of your game going against any team in this league, you’re going to come up short,” said Capitals coach Todd Reirden in a Zoom call after the game.

As Reirden also pointed out, however, the Capitals won their fifth straight Metropolitan Division title this season. Maybe they just got discombobulated by the season’s strange circumstances. They just lost to a team that had dropped seven straight games before the March-12 shutdown, after all. Not every team emerged from the layoff with the same identity.

continued