ARLINGTON, VA – The Washington Capitals face the Dallas Stars on Thursday on the final night of their season-opening three-game homestand. After picking up their first win of the season against the Vegas Golden Knights, the Caps will face the Stars in almost the same group.

Although Thursday morning’s skating was optional, head coach Spencer Carbery confirmed afterward that the team planned to play the same lines against Dallas Charlie Lindgren steps back into the net.

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Carbery told reporters earlier this week that he planned to give both Lindgren and Thompson significant time at the net early in the year, although he hadn’t committed to how he would split the starts.

“We’re just going to play it by ear and try to get both guys involved as much as we can, especially early in the season,” he said at the time. “Let them both play. I don’t think there will be a set plan for the change, but we’ll just continue to try to incorporate it into the future.”

After maintaining much of the same lines and pairings throughout training camp, Carbery shook up the lineup after the Caps lost to the Devils in the home opener, swapping Sonny Milano for Jakub Vrana, moving Ovechkin to the right wing and moving Aliaksei Protas on The right wing moved to the top line and dropped Andrew Mangiapane to the third line. Those changes paid off against the Vegas Golden Knights on Tuesday, as Vrana and Protas each scored a goal, assisted by Mangiapane and Ovechkin, respectively.

Washington faces a Dallas Stars team that was 4-0-0 to start the season and has allowed just five goals in that span. After struggling to score for most of the 2023-24 season, the Capitals have shown more offensive prowess this fall – they have scored seven goals in their two games so far, which took them five games to achieve last season. Carbery praised the team’s offense both on and off the scoresheet.

“We’re still building and there’s still a lot of room for growth, but we’re seeing some of the things that we’ve been trying to implement and talk about and wanted to hit the ground running with,” he said Wednesday. “Because that was one of the biggest challenges for us last year: We were always trying to catch up, to get going offensively and get a little bit more momentum to make some guys feel good.

“I remember we talked about it as a staff, I remember saying this last year, and I might have even said it in the media, I felt like we had 20 people who were completely off Snakes were bitten.” I just couldn’t buy one at the beginning of the season. So if you score a few goals and the boys have a good feeling about it – and we also generate a lot of chances. And that’s the most important part. Finishing is extremely important, but it’s also important to create a lot of quality looks, which we didn’t do so well in the first game, but in the second game (we did). So we’ll just try to build on that.”

As the Caps prepare to face both a stout defense and a dangerous offense on Thursday, they’ll need that offensive spark once again. Puck drop is scheduled for 7:00 p.m. at Capital One Arena.