The Washington Capitals announced earlier this week that Chris Patrick, the team’s associate general manager for the last year, would be taking over the role of general manager from Brian MacLellan. Patrick becomes the seventh general manager in franchise history – and he’ll have some pretty big shoes to fill.

Since making his own way from assistant GM to George McPhee’s replacement back in 2014, MacLellan has established himself as perhaps one of the best in the game, quickly shaping a team that always seemed to fall short year after year into a team that finally hoisted the Stanley Cup and making savvy moves that will hopefully make the organization’s current “retool on the fly” a quick and relatively painless one.

Granted, not every trade or new contract was a good one; he is human (we’re pretty sure) and humans make mistakes. But for every misstep, there seems to be a handful of smart and often surprising moves; for every mistake, a way to correct it.

So as he takes a step back and hands over the reins of the Capitals to Patrick, it’s worth taking one last look back at some of the best moves made by Brian MacLellan over the last decade.

• Brooks Orpik and Matt Niskanen (Signed July 1, 2014). Just two months after taking over as GM, MacLellan took a huge swing to shore up the team’s blueline – and add some leadership to a team that was still a bit aimless. He spent a cool $65M+ to do so, bringing in two veteran defensemen from the rival Penguins, and adding two pieces who would prove vital to the team’s championship run.
• T.J. Oshie (Acquired July 2, 2015). The first big trade of MacLellan’s tenure as GM, and arguably the best one he has made, was a deal swung with the St. Louis Blues to send Troy Brouwer, Pheonix Copley, and a 2016 third-round pick for Oshie. At the time, the team was looking for a winger to play alongside Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom – and boy howdy, did they get one, and then some.
• Justin Williams (Signed July 2, 2015). There’s some sort of twisted irony in the fact that “Mr. Game 7” only appeared in one Game 7 in four playoff series with the Caps – and they lost (to the Penguins, naturally) but Williams was another one of those veteran guys brought in by MacLellan in the early years of his tenure who just seemed to have an immediate impact on the locker room.
• Lars Eller (Acquired June 26, 2016). At the time, the trade that brought Eller to DC from Montreal in exchange for a second-round pick in 2017 and 2018 seemed like a good depth move. A year and a half later, he was signing a five-year extension to stay in the District…and a few months after that, he was scoring the goal that would seal the franchise’s first-ever Stanley Cup.
• Brett Connolly (Signed July 1, 2016). One of the hallmarks of MacLellan’s tenure as GM has been his ability to find diamonds in the rough – players who, for whatever reason, have been cast aside or have needed a change in scenery – and get them to DC on cap-friendly deals only to have them flourish. Connolly was one of the first of these finds, a former first-round pick who never quite clicked in Tampa but became one of the team’s reliable depth players and another piece of the championship puzzle.
• Devante Smith-Pelly (Signed July 3, 2017). There is perhaps no bigger surprise success story of those “diamonds in the rough” players than DSP, who signed a one-year, $650,000 contract in the summer of 2017 and went on to score some of the team’s biggest goals en route to that 2018 Cup.
• Michal Kempny (Acquired February 19, 2018). When the Caps made this deal to bring in Kempny from the Blackhawks, then-coach Barry Trotz noted that “no one can have enough depth on defense”. That turned out to be pretty prophetic, as Kempny went on to be one of the team’s better blueliners down the stretch and through the 2018 playoffs.
• John Carlson (Contract Extension June 24, 2018). At the time, Carlson’s eight-year, $64M contract extension – signed just weeks after the team hoisted the Stanley Cup – maybe raised a few eyebrows. With the benefit of hindsight, though, there’s no question that the deal was well worth it (and perhaps saved them some money in the long run). Carlson has continued to play at a high level over the course of that deal and brought much-needed stability to the team’s constantly changing blueline.
• Nic Dowd (Signed July 1, 2018). Another under-the-radar signing, Dowd was the first addition to the post-Cup Caps, signing a one-year, $650K deal that summer. Since then he’s re-upped a few times and has made himself a home in DC, proving to be one of the better fourth-line centers around.
• Charlie Lindgren (Signed July 13, 2022). The Caps made a goalie splash in the summer of 2022, dumping some homegrown netminders in favor of signing a couple of free agent goalies in Darcy Kuemper and Charlie Lindgren. While the former didn’t work out as well as hoped, the latter sure has (so far) – and all for the bargain price of $1.1M a year.
• Dylan Strome (Signed July 14, 2022). Yet another one of MacLellan’s reclamation projects, Strome was a former third-round pick who (somewhat inexplicably) was bought out by the Blackhawks in the summer of 2022. The Capitals were right there to snap him up, and he’s flourished since coming to DC, signing a contract extension to keep him here through at least 2028.
• Rasmus Sandin (February 28, 2023). When the 2023 trade deadline rolled around, the Capitals were pretty firmly ensconced in the bottom of the Eastern Conference standings and on their way to missing the playoffs for the first time in almost a decade. They needed to get younger, and faster, and add to their blueline depth. With the addition of Sandin, they took a step in the right direction on all of those fronts.

With Patrick having been in the team’s front office over the last decade, and working closely with MacLellan for at least the last year, he’s had an up-close view of all of the now-former GM’s wheeling and dealing (and probably had a hand in a lot of the more recent deals, including the flurry of trades and signings of the last few weeks). As noted above, he’ll have some big shoes to fill – but he’ll also have had a pretty good teacher along the way.