When ESPN's Corey Pronman ranked the Washington Capitals' prospect pool 21st overall earlier this summer, he noted that the Caps had graduated (by his criteria) a couple of "elite youngsters" in Evgeny Kuznetsov and Andre Burakovsky and that "the Capitals' system is thin on prospects above-average or better but has a handful of good prospects."
Depth versus high-end talent will always be a good topic of discussion when evaluating organizational strengths, but we're here to simply count down the top-25 Capitals under the age of 25. And because our parameters don't graduate players until they hit that quarter-century mark, the Caps' system looks fairly strong to us, albeit a bit top-heavy, with a lot of the skill coming from a few select blue-chip players and prospects.