You make some good points. Every player should be measured against the expectations for him and how comparatively a replacement player could perform in the same situation. For my money, I’m not sure what is expected of Johansson.

And I think everyone (even Ian) agrees that Marcus has a terrific future with the organization. I think the argument we make is that a) Perreault could do better right now; and b) Johansson might benefit from getting North American play time with a club where he can work on some parts of his game without the high stakes of the Caps.

Thanks for writing.

Every single game, Marcus seems to be getting it a little more and more. He does not have great offensive awareness yet, his faceoff ability needs to get better, but defensively he is catching on and shows good composure with the puck. I’ve also seen games where he has looked to be one of the better players on the ice.

There are not a lot of great options at center for this team, if there were, the Flash at center experiment would have never taken place. As it stands now, if you play Hendricks, Perreault and of course Backstrom at center and smartly decide to move Flash back to wing, your center options are now Gordon, Steckel or Marcus. I don’t think the other two are good enough to dispose Marcus from that position, especially since the Caps believe strongly that he can be a great player at that position, in the future.

Anyways, great article!

He’s definitely been up and down, so far; but MattyP did look really good the other night. I guess we’ll see how he looks after playing a few more.

I’m a lot more worried about Fahey suiting up again tonight, though.

Further, I didn’t want to bog down the whole post with this, but from what I understood Marcus was either going to play in DC or head back to Sweden this year– and that seemed to be enough leverage to earn him a spot on the Caps roster.

You want to have your AHL prospects working hard for a spot on the Caps roster and think that if they pay their dues, they have a shot to make it. Don’t you think it’d be demoralizing for someone like Perry to be sent down (like he was on the last day of training camp) after the year he had last year? Especially, to be sent down again for a guy that played in Sweden and hasn’t gone through the ranks like he has?

MoJo is a slam dunk Hershey case for me right now. I think he will be a better player than Perreault overall down the road, but I really think it’s Perreault’s time to get a chance to stick. He has worked hard and deserves it. I was glad to see he made the most of his chance Saturday Night.

And Peter’s right, this is premature and really just to get the conversation started. It’s nice that we all had a chance to express our concerns, however! Thanks for commenting.