ARLINGTON, Va. — Spencer Carbery spent most of the summer thinking about his new message.

Last year, his first at the helm of the Washington Capitals, the rookie bench boss decided “Something to prove” would be the team’s through line. He heard the phrase in conversations with his new players, from young guys looking to establish themselves to veterans who were perceived as having little left to give, and he felt it himself as a first-year NHL coach.

Carbery had the phrase painted onto the walls in the Capitals’ dressing rooms, both at their practice facility in Arlington and at Capital One Arena, and Washington rallied around it to pull off an unlikely return to the playoffs.

For his second season, Carbery wanted a new mantra. He settled on two slightly different versions of the same line.

At the practice facility, the walls read: “Everyone. Every detail. Every shift.” At Capital One Arena, there’s a slight adjustment: “Everyone. Everything. Every shift.”

“In the practice rink, we have ‘Every detail’ because it’s more of a practice setting. ‘Everything,’ in a game rink, is our details,” Carbery said in a preseason roundtable with Washington Post writers and editors. “It’s our work. It’s everything. We’ve got to put everything into it.”

The Capitals made the playoffs last season by the slimmest of margins, taking the final wild-card spot in the Eastern Conference because they held a tiebreaker over the Detroit Red Wings. This season’s team undoubtedly has more talent thanks to an offseason roster transformation that brought in seven new players.

Pierre-Luc Dubois and Andrew Mangiapane are expected to add scoring to the top two lines. Brandon Duhaime and Taylor Raddysh will anchor the fourth line with Nic Dowd and chip in offensively. Matt Roy and Jakob Chychrun bring defensive stability (Roy) and offensive dynamism (Chychrun) to the back end. And Logan Thompson will partner with Charlie Lindgren to form a stable duo in net.

“The new guys have been awesome,” winger Tom Wilson said. “I know there’s a lot of new faces, but it seems like they’re guys that you just pick right up and feel like you’ve kind of known them forever. … We’re excited as a group. Talking to the guys, talking to some of the older guys that have been around, we’re excited about this group this year. That being said, it’s going to be on us to go out there and put a good product together on the ice and win some games.”

Wilson’s final point highlighted why Carbery chose his new message. Yes, these Capitals should score a few more goals than they did last year, and ideally they will be a bit tighter defensively. But a slew of new faces and more talent on paper don’t change the fact that Washington is still going to have to do things the hard way.

“The way we have to play — and it’s really difficult — we don’t rely on four players anymore or five players,” Carbery said. “We need every single player. … It’s just a reminder to our guys of, in order for us to have success, it’s going to take every single person. That’s staff included. And it’s going to need to be consistent every single night.”

Last season’s Capitals never found the consistency Carbery was seeking. After a slow start, they started to string wins together for stretches, but the ups were always followed by downs. To some extent, that’s expected in an 82-game campaign, but Carbery and his players know they can’t count on squeaking into the playoffs as they did last April.

With a week-long gap between the final preseason game and Saturday night’s regular season opener against the New Jersey Devils, Carbery decided to hold two practices at Capital One Arena at the start of this week. The motivation was twofold. For one thing, it mixed up the regular routine, with the hopes that the week wouldn’t feel so long. It also gave Washington’s players a rare opportunity to practice at their game rink.

The Capitals are one of the few teams in the NHL that don’t practice or hold pregame skates at their game arena, and Carbery noticed it took his team a while to settle in on home ice at the beginning of last season. Ahead of a season in which Washington again will have to scrap and claw for every point, Carbery wasn’t going to pass up a chance to help his team get off to a better start.

“I don’t think it’s too crazy much that it’s going to help, but we obviously don’t have the best ice surface [in Arlington], so I think just to get out there and feel it and feel some bounces [is beneficial],” center Dylan Strome said.

“Carbs talked about sight lines and stuff, just getting familiar with it. [We have] a lot of new guys, so it can’t hurt.”

After all, every detail matters.