HandshakeLine
A real jerk thing
The Capitals are on paper an almost flawless team from top to bottom, including coaching. This is why the play the games.
If they can't beat this Pens team then maybe this core just wasn't meant to win a Stanley Cup. I can't see any way that they could get better next season save dropping Alzner (and maybe Orpik) and upgrading at 3C.
Washington has historically iced some really good clubs, from the 90s on, with some great players on them (I would have loved to have had Ciccarelli or Iafrate on those early 90s Pens squads). But where they've fallen flat has fairly consistently been in the coaching department.
And to be fair, that was also the knock on the Pens for the better part of the last decade- great teams on paper, subpar coaching from Therrien and Bylsma and Johnston. If I were Brian MacLellan, I'd think hard about the core, sure, but I'd think even harder about the bench, from the assistants on up.
The other thing that isn't really talked about in these discussions again, is the role of the non-Head Coaches on the bench. The Pens have been able to take cast off blueliners like Cole, Schultz, Niskannen, and Daley and rework their games to an amazing degree because they're working with Jacques Martin and Sergei Gonchar. We all complained when Gonch and Martin were brought onto the coaching staff (nepotism, bloated staff, etc.), but it's really worked wonders.