By 7:30 a.m. Thursday, Andrew Cristall was already awake. His day wasn’t supposed to start for another 45 minutes, but Cristall, 18, was set to play that night for the Washington Capitals. He couldn’t help but be up.
Washington’s game against the Detroit Red Wings was just a preseason contest, but that didn’t make a difference for Cristall, the Capitals’ second-round pick in this year’s draft. It was the first time he would put on a Capitals jersey and play in a game at Capital One Arena, and he could barely contain his excitement.
“It was a lot of fun,” said Cristall, who allowed The Washington Post to shadow him Thursday. “Definitely an adjustment at the start. I think I got comfortable as the game went on. It was a lot of fun to go out there and play with the pros for a day.”
Cristall is several years away from becoming a full-time NHL player, and the Capitals sent him back to his junior team in Kelowna, British Columbia, on Friday. So this was his first training camp with Washington, the first time he had an opportunity to put on an NHL jersey.
The Capitals opened training camp with 63 players, and by Oct. 9 the roster will be down to a maximum of 23. That means that for a couple of weeks, rookies such as Cristall — the youngest player at Washington’s camp this year — are intermixed with entrenched veterans such as Alex Ovechkin, T.J. Oshie, Evgeny Kuznetsov and Tom Wilson. For the veterans, the preseason can be monotonous and rote, but for young players, it can hold special moments. Their joy shines through when they get in the lineup — and permeates throughout the team.
“[The veterans] go back, I’m sure, in their heads and remember when they were that age and just coming up,” Coach Spencer Carbery said. “They were nervous, and everything was coming at them all at once. It takes them back to those moments when they came up, and they’re all rooting for them.”
The team hotel, where Cristall and his fellow prospects were staying during training camp, wasn’t far from Washington’s practice facility. They trickled over to the facility for breakfast on their own time, and Cristall arrived shortly before 9 a.m.
Cristall loaded up a plate with eggs, potatoes, turkey sausage and bacon. After a light stretch, he put on his gear and taped his sticks before heading to meetings with the coaching staff — his usual routine before a morning skate. The first meeting of the morning was at 9:45, followed by another at 10, and by 10:09, Cristall headed to the ice carrying a red bucket of pucks — a classic rookie duty.
The schedule called for him to be on the ice at 10:15, but it wasn’t a surprise that he was out there a few minutes early.
“I like getting out there early and getting some puck touches before the actual practice starts,” Cristall said. “I kind of just love being out there, so if I can get out there early, I’ll probably be out there.”
At 10:30 on the dot, assistant coach Scott Allen blew his whistle to get started. It was an optional practice, so the formal drills lasted for only about 10 minutes — but Cristall, predictably, spent every minute he could on the ice.
Listed at 5-foot-9 and 175 pounds — each measurement might be a bit generous — Cristall is on the smaller side. But the Vancouver native has electrifying skill and a level of ability with the puck that few can match, making him one of Washington’s most intriguing prospects. He is the definition of a rink rat, always trying to squeeze out every possible moment with a puck on his stick.
Cristall’s energetic, gregarious personality fits well with his flashy style of play; it always seems he’s having the most fun of anyone in the building.
Carbery had a brief conversation with Cristall during the morning skate, imparting a final message to the forward as he finished preparing for his first taste of NHL action.
“He’s a young, young player, and he looks it,” Carbery said Wednesday. “He’s going to grow. He’s going to mature and all that stuff. I find, though, when he’s out on the ice, things happen. He’s around the puck. Good things happen. … I’ve just found he constantly has caught my eye.”
Cristall was one of the last players to get off the ice. After the morning skate, the challenge was finding a way to relax before the game and conserve his energy for the night ahead.
A nap is a staple of most hockey players’ pregame routines, but Cristall didn’t plan on one Thursday; he didn’t expect to be able to fall asleep. Instead, he went back to the hotel and watched TV — he recently started watching “Lucifer,” and he loves “Ted Lasso” — as he tried his best to chill out.
“It’s kind of the time where you just have to enjoy the moment,” Cristall said. “You try not to think too much ahead, and you kind of just want to sit there and take care of yourself.”
The first major snag in an otherwise smooth day hit after Cristall arrived at Capital One Arena two hours before the game. He hitched a ride to the arena with defenseman Vincent Iorio, and when the duo arrived, Cristall was so enthusiastic about getting inside and starting his pregame routine that he left his sneakers in the car. It wasn’t until defenseman John Carlson commented on the black dress shoes Cristall was wearing — to go with the light gray suit he wore to arrive at the game — that he realized something was missing.
Cristall hurried back up the hallway and into the parking garage. His smile turned sheepish as he made his way back to the locker room.
“I made sure I brought my shoes in the car, and I had them, and then I walked in and I was like, ‘Yeah, I might need those,’ ” Cristall said. “It was pretty funny.”
At 6:28 p.m., No. 28 took the ice for warmups at Capital One Arena for the first time.
“The fact that I got this opportunity is awesome,” Cristall said. “Definitely some jitters at the start, running out there with all the music and the lights and everything, but it’s been pretty special.”
The puck dropped at 7:05 p.m. Skating on the fourth line with Michael Sgarbossa and Pierrick Dube, Cristall had to wait his turn for his first shift, but at 7:10, he was on the ice.
It wasn’t an explosive debut; Cristall skated the third-fewest minutes among the Capitals and took some time to find his footing. But in the third period, working with the second power-play unit, he grabbed the puck off the end boards and passed it up to defenseman Rasmus Sandin at the blue line. Sandin fired a shot that sailed through the offensive zone and found the net, giving Cristall a primary assist.
“He had a really good shot,” Cristall said, grinning. “I kind of just had to lay it off from the boards to him, but it’s always nice to get one and feel confident.”
Cristall is a member of Washington’s next generation. By the time he arrives as a full-fledged NHL player, some of the veterans he shared his first training camp with will have moved on. The Capitals are set to be one of the oldest teams in the NHL again, and it isn’t a secret that many of the squad’s core players are in the later stages of their careers.
But for a few weeks this fall, Cristall, who has the potential to be a star in Washington as he develops, got a glimpse at what his future could look like — and he was thrilled by it.
Washington faced the Red Wings again Saturday, this time in Detroit, in the third of its six preseason games. Some 2,300 miles away, Cristall was set to make his season debut for Kelowna the same night, still carrying the memories from his first taste of the NHL.
After Thursday’s game, Cristall spoke to the media in the locker room, seated between the stalls of Kuznetsov and Oshie. Wilson called across the room that Cristall should do the interview under his own nameplate, but Cristall looked up at the two names above his head and decided it was a pretty good place to sit.
“One time in the bench in the third, I kind of sat back and was like, ‘Wow, I’m playing the Detroit Red Wings right now,’ ” Cristall said. “I used to watch them on TV all the time. That’s a pretty cool experience for me to have and nice that I was able to step back and realize the magnitude of it. It was super fun.”