ARLINGTON, VA — A first taste of NHL life arrived late for Ethen Frank, who was 26 by the time Washington finally summoned him. He has not wasted a shift of it. Dropped onto the third line almost immediately after getting the call, the winger has appeared in every contest that followed and produced four points — three of them goals — across his opening 10 games.
Game number 10, played Thursday against Ottawa, came with a catch the standings never reflect. Crossing that line ended Frank's exemption from waivers. Up to that point — thanks to him being exposed to waivers during training camp — the front office could move him between Washington and the minors freely, provided he stayed beneath both 10 total games and 30 cumulative days in the league. That flexibility is now gone. Demoting him to the Hershey Bears would first require running him through waivers and hoping no rival club claims him.
Spencer Carbery, the bench boss, didn't hide the bind on Saturday. By his own account, Frank has been a standout virtually every night he's dressed, and a case could be made that he's earned heavier usage than he's received. The staff went in fully aware the 10-game wall was coming, Carbery noted, but the player kept forcing the issue with his performance. The coach stressed that nothing has been handed to Frank — he's scraped for everything across his career and since the call-up alike — yet the reality is plain: he's no longer waiver-protected, the team keeps writing his name into the lineup anyway, and parting with a contributor like that holds no appeal. In Carbery's framing, Frank had backed the organization into an awkward corner simply by being too good to scratch.
The output justifies the dilemma. His goal total over the span sits tied for third on the club, bettered only by a pair of teammates — Pierre-Luc Dubois and Ovechkin, each of whom has four. The possession metrics tell the same tale. Whenever Frank takes a five-on-five shift, Washington has tilted the rink: a 49-to-40 edge in chances created, a 22-to-11 lead in the high-danger variety, and a 4.90-to-3.32 cushion in expected goals, per the numbers at Natural Stat Trick.
That lost exemption looms larger once Sonny Milano is cleared to play. Out of action since hurting his upper body back on Nov. 6, the forward was still wearing a no-contact sweater at Saturday's session. With the roster already maxed out at 23 and nobody left who can be shuttled down quietly, the team will have to waive someone to activate Milano off injured reserve — and the player exposed could conceivably be Milano himself.
The calendar piles on yet another wrinkle. To suit up in the AHL's postseason, a skater has to be carried on a Hershey roster when the league's deadline arrives on the seventh of March. That means Frank could only feature for the Bears this spring by first clearing waivers before then — and even then, Washington would need to burn one of the four recalls it's granted after the deadline to pull him back up.
None of this is new territory for the Caps. They wrestled with the identical scenario twelve months ago and decided to hold Mike Sgarbossa beyond the 10-game line. Sgarbossa finished the year in Washington and never factored into the Bears' Calder Cup push that season.