This one will be easy. Blaine Forsythe has spent the last 14 seasons as an assistant for the Washington Capitals. He worked under Boudreau. Won a Cup with Trotz.
According the Tarik Bel-Ashir’s April 20th Athletic article [here](https://theathletic.com/4429549/2023/04/20/blaine-forsythe-capitals/), Adam Oates plopped Ovechkin in the left faceoff circle in 2012-13 and then handed Forsythe the reins. He’s been their power play coach since then, and only twice was it under 20% (19.4% in 2019-20 and 18.8% in 2021-22). Last season, with John Carlson, Tom Wilson, TJ Oshie, and Nicklas Backstrom missing large chunks of the season, the Capitals finished 16th in the league with a 21.2% conversion rate.
With that, it’s a chicken or the egg. How much credit can you give Forsythe for the power play’s success when it’s hallmark is one of the top 3 power play scorers of all-time burying shot after shot, even though everyone knows where Ovechkin will be? Or maybe that’s the key to his coaching, that even though every team knows where Ovi is the power play is talented enough to produce.
In addition, Forsythe was in charge of the centers. Their last five seasons they had a faceoff ranking of 16th (49.5), 30th (47.1), 22nd (49.2), 28th (48.3), and 31st (45.7). Sure, some of that is personnel, but for a team that needs to mold its younger centers into more reliable faceoff men, that’s too low.
I’ll be honest, I’d never heard of Forsythe until Russo mentioned him in the Brett McLean article. He’s worked with Dean Evason and Bob Woods before in Washington, but just smacks of “he’s a guy I know and trust”, not “he’s got the know-how to make our special teams better” (Step One: trade for Ovechkin).
It’s Bill Guerin’s task to make sure he knows the difference.
by PaxDragoon
3 Comments
This is an interesting write-up. I hate the idea of running back the same set of coaches. You can’t fire everyone whenever, but there needs to be some change after the disastrous special teams in playoffs.
> How much credit can you give Forsythe for the power play’s success when it’s hallmark is one of the top 3 power play scorers of all-time burying shot after shot, even though everyone knows where Ovechkin will be?
Ovi is actually the top PP goal scorer of all time now with 299, which beats the previous record held by Dave Andreychuk at 274. We are likely about a season and a half from him becoming the all time goal scoring king in NHL history too by passing Gretzky’s 894 goals. If he does it in 140 games or less, he will have also reached that mark faster than Gretzky did. At this point, he’s almost certainly going down in history as the most prolific goal scorer of all time.
In other words, I put a lot of Washington’s success on his shoulders since he came into the league. I would take any PP success there, both for a coach and anyone on PP1, with a massive block of salt.
Caps fan here who adopted the wild after living in minneapolis.
He was…strongly disliked in Washington and we were quite pleased overall to see him go. Take that as you will