[Ed. note: Capitals During Wartime has illuminated struggles in Washington leading up to the trade deadline. Read previous installments: Centerless, Road-weary, Negativity, Bruce vs. Dale, and Trending topics.]

By this time Monday, Capitals general manager George McPhee will have already made whatever moves he has deemed wise for the future of his club. With all the prognostication and educated guessing about trade scenarios going around, I have decided not to add any noise to an already muffled signal.

Instead, we conclude this series with a look at two Capitals players who will loom large on Monday in one way or another. Those players are Mike Knuble and Tomas Vokoun.

Mike Knuble’s Walk into the Sunset

Mike Knuble is a 39-year old right winger with a Stanley Cup ring on his finger. In his first two seasons with the Capitals, he scored 53 goals and 40 assists. This year he has only 3 goals and 9 assists.

Mike Knuble spent most of his first two seasons paired with Nick Backstrom.

Knuble has been scratched five times in recent weeks. When he has played, he served on the bottom two lines rather than in a trio with Alex Ovechkin and Nick Backstom like in years past. And now, having not played in nearly a week, Mike Knuble’s name is popping up in trade rumors.

Many teams intent on a playoff run would love to add Mike Knuble’s leadership, experience, and net presence to their chemistry. The only questions are whether he still has a spark after 16 seasons in the NHL, and what Washington will demand for his release.

To answer the first question, one need only look at how Knuble has been used this season. Accepting first and foremost that all players decline as they age, we should also add that Knuble did not flourish until his 30′s, a maneuver we may call the Reverse Gretzky. While it is possible that Knuble suddenly and profoundly hit the proverbial wall this year, let’s consider some other explanations for his lessened output.

• After starting in the offensive zone between 55% and 56% of the time in 09-10 and 10-11, Knuble dropped to 43.5% this year. A good way of thinking about this: there has been a lot more ice between Mike and the net this year.
• Instead of having Nick Backstrom (7.4 Corsi Rel and 53% of scoring chances going towards the other guy’s net) driving play as his most common linemate, Knuble relied on Marcus Johansson (-8.6 Corsi Rel and 46% scoring chances). While both Swedish centers are talented, the Backstrom is a much stronger player and without him production would obviously decline.
• Knuble’s average ice time fell from just under 17-18 minutes in his first two years  in Washington to just over 14 this year. Knuble has been scratched 5 times this year.
• Finally, and perhaps most mysteriously, Knuble’s PDO (a proxy for luck that sums up on-ice save% and shooting% and normalizes around 1000) is just 972 this year, falling from 1010 last year and 1048 (!) two seasons ago. Even when he’s been given a chance to shoot, Knuble has been denied by the fates.

Note: I’m relying on Behind the Net for a lot of these stats, and– as always– Neil Greenberg’s indispensable scoring chance data.

In summary, Mike Knuble has had inferior linemates, longer distances to the net, less time to produce, and just plain bad luck. While it’s likely age has something to do with his fall-off, these other factors are much more compelling. If Mike Knuble is traded to a team that gives him real opportunity to contribute, we may see the old man producing like his old self again.

That might suck to watch as a fan of the Washington Capitals, but as a fan of hockey in general and this player in particular, we ought to be glad if Knuble gets the opportunity to walk into the sunset in the manner of his choosing.

Tomas Vokoun’s Big Decision

Last summer, Tomas Vokoun left a position of prominence with the Florida Panthers to join a team that he thought had a better chance to win. Vokoun took a significant pay cut to play in Washington, earning just $1.5M to play for a team that now earns about one fifth of a point less per game than the Panthers.

Vokoun’s time in D.C. has not been consistently good. Along with Michal Neuvirth, his poor goaltending in October and November probably contributed to Bruce Boudreau’s firing. After losing some starts to the younger Czech goalie, Vokoun vented his frustration to the press. Most recently, Coach Dale Hunter blamed recent losses on Vokoun’s performance in net.

But despite those hiccups, Vokoun has been excellent during Hunter’s reign.

Note: This chart is a 10-game moving average of save percentage. Boudreau was replaced after Vokoun’s 17th game, the low point above.

In recent days, Japers’ Rink Noon Number feature has shared insight into how goalie performance has affected the Capitals’ fortunes. In short, the Capitals rarely win after giving up 4 goals, and they regularly lost in February unless they had perfect or near-perfect goaltending. On JP’s own twitter account, he told us that the Capitals are a stellar team when their goaltending is average or better, and kind of awful without.

With all the noise made about Alex Ovechkin’s slump or the priority of offense to the Capitals’ success, the performance of the guy in the cage has been more crucial. That’s why the Capitals’ 7 shutouts, 4 by Vokoun alone, have been such a boon to the red team.

Tomas Vokoun watches from the bench as Michal Neuvirth plays.

In addition to being far too valuable to deal, Tomas Vokoun also has a no-move clause on his contract. But he turns into an unrestricted pumpkin on July 1, so hard decisions will have to be made.

It’s unlikely Vokoun would accept a “winner’s discount” for another contract with Washington, and it’s possible that the tense off-ice atmosphere (e.g. Dale Hunter’s criticism) might dissuade him from even considering an offer.

Meanwhile, George McPhee told Elliotte Friedman that he is interested only in deals that will improve the long-term health of his team. Either way, there’s negotiations to be had.

I think it more likely than not that both Mike Knuble and Tomas Vokoun will part company with the Capitals– either on Monday or at the end of the season. And that’s a shame.

In Mike Knuble’s case, the player has been deprived a fair chance to succeed. For Tomas Vokoun, a bad start doomed his chance to play for the winner he wanted. As much as I’d like to see Caps management give Mike Knuble another chance and have Vokoun consider giving Washington another go, the cold reality of the hockey business don’t really support it.

These are just two players among many who may not be long for this team. That’s the way of things in professional sports. Unpleasant as it is, fans in D.C. must now say goodbye to some of their favorite players– just a few more casualties of the Capitals during wartime.

[Ed. note: This is fifth installment of Capitals During Wartime, a series about Washington's struggles before the 2012 trade deadline. Read previous entries about coaching, negativity, road performance, and centers.]

Everyone has the moment when you realize that the Caps are in serious trouble. You know when mine was, because that’s when I started this Capitals During Wartime series. For Ian, it was Monday night, when he finally admitted to me how worried he was. For the rest of the Internet and the broader hockey community, that moment is right now.

This article documents The Week from Hell, a litany of depressing and infuriating stories about your Washington Capitals. Because we need a single, coherent record of what exactly it was like when things couldn’t possibly get any worse.

The fourth item in a column by thirty dimensional thinker Elliotte Friedman told us that George McPhee has been the most active deal-maker in the run-up to the trade deadline. With this knowledge, we must view all team moves through the prism of an impending trade– and we must view the team itself as we might a long-term relationship on the verge of a nasty break-up.

Tomas Vokoun missed Sunday’s and Monday’s games due to the flu, disrupting the impeccable goaltending that has kept the Capitals just barely afloat. Michal Neuvirth was expected to make both starts, but was replaced on Monday by Hershey’s Braden Holtby. Video of an embarrassing 90-foot goal surrendered by Holtby showed up on Yahoo and the Pensblog.

When asked about why he chose Holtby over Neuvirth, Coach Dale Hunter made two distressing points. First, he said the reason for the call-up was because he didn’t want Neuvirth playing back-to-back games (a feeling he did not share for Holtby, who played even later on Sunday than Neuvirth). Then, on Wednesday, Hunter told WaPo’s Katie Carrera this:

It’s one of those things that if he was standing on his head every night, would Braden be playing? No.

Neuvirth said he was not informed of the replacement until he arrived at Verizon Center Monday night, and he found the whole ordeal “tough to swallow.”

Adding to the rift between Hunter and his players is the ongoing saga with Mike Knuble. Scratched in the last three games (all Caps losses), Knuble made several angst-ridden but polite statements to the press about his situation. The 39-year-old, Stanley-Cup-winning veteran (who has scored more in his 30s than Wayne Gretzky and had not been benched in a decade) called his first scratch “humbling” and the second “frustrating.” By the third game he missed, Knuble was musing on hypothetical trade situations, saying:

You want to go somewhere where you’re going to play and contribute to the team. If you can’t do it one place, then you got to go.

Perhaps aware of the growing disquiet, Knuble declined to comment further about the matter this week, telling the Washington Times’ Stephen Whyno that he has been “a little too dramatic,” and telling CSN’s Chuck Gormley that he has already “said [his] peace.”

Even Coach Hunter offered encouraging words about Knuble, adding, “He looked good. . . He’s chomping at the bit to go, so again we’ll see what happens.” Knuble skated with the third line at Wednesday’s practice and is expected to play in Florida this weekend.

Caps icon and assistant goalie coach Olie Kolzig leapt to the defense of Dale Hunter on Wednesday, offering this tasty quote about Hunter’s methods to hungry reporters from various outlets:

If that’s what it’s going to take to get this team close to winning a Stanley Cup then I think at the end of the day if that happens all those unpopular decisions will all of the sudden look pretty smart.

It was a stirring and contrary position, but one undercut quite a bit for three reasons: 1) the paucity of Kolzig’s appearances at Kettler; b) the ominously qualifying “if” preposition; and iii) Neil Greenberg’s recent recalibration of the Capitals’ chances for a postseason. Greenberg observes that the Capitals face a daunting challenge to make the playoffs, and that “the margin of error is razor thin no matter what the future holds for the roster.”

Kolzig was then apparently asked the age-old question: what’s wrong with Alex Ovechkin? Kolzig, who was once one of D.C.’s most loved players, advised that Ovechkin should “maybe not get wrapped up too much with the rock star status that comes with being Alex Ovechkin.”

That line, of course, got picked up by all kinds of hockey press. It even made Puck Daddy’s headlines with the old “phrase-it-like-a-question” technique.

Ovechkin, for his part, dispelled any accusations of his celebrity overriding his play by… debuting this new commercial for Verizon.

At that point, contributors to national sports networks offered their takes. A.J. Perez of Fox Sports pointed out that fan attendance at Capitals practice has diminished significantly, and Joe Yerdon of NBC’s ProHockeyTalk basked in the schadenfreude like he always does.

The Valentine’s Day edition of Sportsnet’s Marek vs Wyshynski amped up the volume on the Capitals’ suffering even more by making this its question of the day: How would you fix the Washington Capitals? [conversation is around one hour in]. Any kind of in-depth discussion by national media about a single team usually retreats into nebulous characterization or innuendo (which is fine, since those guys have 29 other teams to worry about and besides– it’s sports radio, designed to provoke). Their conclusion was more about Alex Ovechkin’s decline and some perceived conflict between Ovechkin and Hunter than any kind of systemic problems (like defensive reformulation or moving away from a run-and-gun style).

But really, what has gone wrong with Alex Ovechkin beyond the normal ravages of time and changing from a system where offense trumps all to one that either inhibits offense or just cannot generate it? Ovechkin himself talked down his own shortfalls by advancing another pernicious excuse: injury.

It’s not a secret that we miss [Mike Green] and Nicky [Backstrom]. Some people might think it’s good for us to see how good we are without those guys. Everybody knows how good we are, but without those guys this team is not that good.

Even the good folks in the organization got in on the struggle. On Wednesday’s Capitals Report, John Walton said he considers inconsistency to be chief among the team’s troubles. Senior Writer Mike Vogel published to Dump’n'Chase a treatise on the changes the team has tried to effect positive results without success.

But we finish where we began. In a lengthy piece for Monday’s Washington Post, John Feinstein sat down with George McPhee. The crucial argument McPhee makes is that the team was great until they got hurt:

. . . We’ve only had that team on ice for eight games. We’re 8-0 in those games.

Injury is an eventuality in hockey as columnist Tracee Hamilton pointed out (and for once, I agree with her). A team that cannot withstand a single injury might not have been that good to begin with. Regardless, we now know that McPhee will be busy at the deadline, and that means some of our favorites are going to leave D.C.

Maybe that just means saying goodbye to players who might play better with another club. But isn’t that pretty much every player at this point?

Strange — isn’t it — that the spotlight of national attention is brightest on the Capitals while they are so mired in fog. Player-coach disputes and dimming stardom and unfortunate quotations all seem to have popped up at the least opportune time. The Capitals leave town on Thursday for a road trip that may be both determinative for their season and the last for this incarnation of the roster.

I used the word nadir to describe Bruce Boudreau’s final game as coach, but I was wrong. We are steeped in it now. This moment right here is the Capitals during wartime, and everyone is watching. Failure is expected, and it’s expected to be huge.

But there’s a little glimmer of hope. Mike Green skated a full practice on Wednesday, his first since undergoing surgery for a hernia last month. He’ll be travelling with the team this weekend and might even play.

In the midst of all this melodrama and pathos, Mike Green is– as Steven Whyno described him– ”all smiles.”

[Ed. note: Capitals During Wartime is a series analyzing Washington's struggles before the 2012 trade deadline. We've discussed weakness at center, a poor road record, and negativity among fans so far.] 

In the latest edition of Capitals During Wartime, I mused about how and why we discuss the negative stuff going on with Capitals right now. Concluding, in short, that our foremost responsibility is to the Truth, and not just Good Feelings, I promised not to shy away from D.C.’s ongoing hockey bummers– but also not to drench that analysis in hyperbole.

This article is a statistical rundown of the Washington Capitals through 54 games for the purpose comparing the tenures of Bruce Boudreau and Dale Hunter head to head. But I will not be offering any commentary. My voice is limited to the selection of statistics below. Any conclusions you make or narratives you perceive are your own. I have included traditional stats, some advanced stats, and some individual curiosities that we’ve discussed recently on the site.

So obviously there’s some author bias present in the figures I chose to use here. I chose stats that I thought would be illuminating or provocative in comparing the two. The stats are not uniformly flattering of either coach, and the actual efficacy of the coach upon many of these numbers should be debated. But I’m not going to do that for you– because that would be far too depressing.

No, basically this is like what the editor at the The New Frontiersman says to the intern in that last scene from Watchmen: I leave it entirely in your hands. 

What do the numbers tell you?

Thanks to Ian for suggestions and Neil Greenberg for planting the seed. Check out Arctic Ice Hockey’s item on Alex Ovechkin’s possession and conversion under the two coaches for a similar digestion. 

[Ed. note: This is our third article about the Washington Capitals before the trade deadline. Part I discussed the center position, and Part II compared the Caps home and away.]

Way back when Ian first blackmailed me into writing about the Capitals everyday, it was easy. The Caps were on the way to their best ever season, a copious and capacious 121-point campaign that was chock-full of nutritious, whole-grain scoarmoargoals. My job was basically to regurgitate some boxcar stats, writing something defamatory about the other team, and think of escalatingly ridiculous metaphors for the Caps’ awesomesauce.

It was terrific, but that’s over now.

I’m not gonna get into it, but I think we can agree that Capitals are having trouble this season– even if we differ about the precise degree of that trouble. And while there are many varied and valid ways to express our disappointment with the team, my endeavor is to be as sober and honest about the Capitals’ struggles as I had been drunken and boastful about their victories. Is that bumming you out?

Let’s start with common ground: we’re all fans. I know you’re an I-bleed-red Caps fanatic because you took time out of your busy day collating project plans and delivering deliverables to read this silly little blog post. You know that I’m a radicalized Caps psycho because I’ve written, edited. and proofed thousands of words about the team and because of that futile Matt Bradley vigil from last summer.

You and me? We’re kindred. Compatriots. Homies. We cheered for game four at MSG and the snowpocalyse and Perry’s hat trick, and we wept when Chris Clark got traded and Wides’ leg got split open like an over-ripe melon and when Sasha’s necklace broke. Any difference in opinion we may have about the present tense is just a little spat between siblings. Are we cool?

My personal mission statement for writing about hockey (beyond beating Japers Rink to publish game recaps) was to make the game as fun to read about as it was to watch. Now that watching hockey is somewhat less fun, I’m finding other reasons to write. Namely, to discover exactly why it was fun before and how our team can get back there.

Yeah, that means I point out how and when our boys play poorly. Addressing these problems– especially the systemic ones– without sentimentality or intellectual dishonesty is a moral imperative for hockey writing that I just made up just now. While that means my recaps are not as spaced-out and cartoony as they had been, I think they’re serving a purpose nonetheless.

The more we know about our team’s trouble, the more we know about our salvation. And if we pay close attention, we’ll see the beginning of that salvation before anyone else does. We’ll cheer louder for the players leading the charge and watch with rapt attention the ones on the cusp of turning it around– because we know what’s going on.

I don’t report sad stats because I’m a pessimist. I know it’s hard and unfair to judge intentions in other people, so here’s my solemn assurance the facts are objectively gnarly. Building a narrative around facts isn’t the same as letting an agenda dictate the story, although it is seductive to confuse the two. I’m not here clamoring for traffic, shouting fire in a crowded theater, or doing anything devious except looking for new ways to illuminate a mysterious and disappointing season.

And it’s not like we’re going to despair. Never that. The trend lines may head downward, but there is hope for this team. Of all the people I know who predict a gloomy spring for the Caps, none lacks something to which he looks forward. Whether it’s the looming advent of Evgeny Kuznetsov, the promise of an busy trade deadline by George McPhee, or the ever-increasing health of Nick Backstrom and Mike Green, there is always something rad on the horizon.

I resolve to do a better job of keeping these in perspective.

Because, eventually, this team is going to be on top again. I’m asking you to stick with them– and with us– until they do. When we all emerge from this long dark night together, the other side will be even brighter. That’s when RMNB will return to the gleeful, caffeine-adled, bleeding edge of sanity that we surfed until you found us in the first place.

In the meantime, we’re going to continue this brutal mirror staredown. But never without humor and never without hope.

When the Caps got blown out 7-0 by the Rangers in December of 2010, we initiated the Panic Protocol– an emergency policy that required a site redesign and the excommunication of all redheaded people from Facebook. It was a lark, as you all figured out eventually, but it had some meaning in that moment.

In that article, I used a song by Drive-By Truckers, “Gravity’s Gone”, to explain the seeming hopelessness of the Caps’ situation. To play us out, here’s me on the ukelele while the bulldog snores beside me.

Crash the net.

Thanks to Ana Hansen for her advice and pathological cheerfulness on this topic.

[Ed. note: this is the second article in our series about the Capitals' struggles leading up to the trade deadline. The first Capitals During Wartime post addressed the team's problems with the center position.]

At the end of All-Star Break, the Washington Capitals sit in 3rd place in the Eastern Conference and 1st in the Southeast Division, but their prospects for the postseason are not secure. The Southeast has two challengers– the Florida Panthers (with whom the Caps are virtually tied) and the Winnipeg Jets. Plus, the Capitals have a tough schedule down the stretch– including some tough games on the road. When Neil Greenberg at the Washington Post looked at the Caps’ remaining schedule, he was not encouraged.

That’s because the road is where the Capitals have had most of their troubles this season. The team’s home record of 18-6-1 is fourth best in the league, but away they are just 8-13-2, a dismal 25th. One spectacularly bad road game in Buffalo on November 26th probably cost Coach Boudreau his job. The power play and penalty kill perform vastly better in Verizon Center than they do when away. With 18 away games remaining, the Capitals will have to do better on the road if they want to make the playoffs.

The article looks at the Caps’ troubles away from D.C. from several angles: possession, shooting, special teams, and Alex Ovechkin. And because it’s interesting, I’m comparing Bruce Boudreau and Dale Hunter too. Uh oh.

Shooting

The Capitals are in deep trouble when it comes to generating offense. They are currently 28th in cumulative shots on goal and will likely become sole occupants of the league’s basement within a month. But surprisingly, the shooting malaise isn’t a problem of the road versus home.

The Capitals average 26.4 shots at home and 28.2 away. Both totals are measly. And it only tells half the story.

I counted even-strength shots both for and against, both home and away, under Hunter and under Boudreau.

The unfortunate conclusion here is that the Capitals can’t keep pace with their opponents– wherever they play. Specifically, during Dale Hunter’s time the Capitals have seen their hometown advantage on offense vanish.

It’s worth mentioning that the Capitals win over 70% of games when they outshoot their opponents (2nd best in the league), but only 45% when they’re outshot (17th in the league). If they win 45% of their remaining games, they will not make the playoffs.

At even strength, the Capitals have outshot just one team at home since Dale Hunter took over. It was the Calgary Flames. On the road, they have fared slightly better– just not recently. Right after Hunter came to town, the Caps outshot the Panthers, the Senators, the Jets, the Avalanche, and the Devils. But none of those teams are offensive powerhouses, and the Caps have been dominated ever since.

But at least it’s not a road-home thing.

Possession

Okay, okay. Not everyone is on board with advanced stats. But while a team’s overall record does a good job of telling you their outcomes so far, Fenwick is better at predicting their future.

Fenwick is the total of a team’s even-strength shots, goals, misses– subtracted by the opposing team’s total. I’ll tell you right now that the team is  minus-87 overall, and that ain’t good.

The team isn’t keeping pace with their opponents either at home or away. Yeah, it’s worse on the road, but what’s more noticeable is how the team’s possession has declined under Coach Hunter. Boudreau left the Capitals in the black — although much of that success was earned during the 7-game winning streak that opened the season. Since Hunter took over, possession at home has been obliterated.

These Fenwick scores disregard the game’s score. To be fair, the Caps are a bit stronger when the score is close (16th), but their dramatic drop-offs in possession when ahead or behind by at least two points exceeds other teams in the league (29th and 27th, respectively).

Power Play

The Capitals power play is ranked 13th overall with an 18.5% conversion rate. That middle-of-the-pack stat is hiding the truth of the matter, because this team is night-and-day depending on where they play.

The Capitals have a terrific power play in Chinatown, hitting the net almost a quarter of the time. But once they leave those friendly confines, the man-advantage falls off a cliff.

The good news is that the power play has gotten better in both circumstances under Coach Hunter. Not good enough, clearly, but progress is being made.

Penalty Kill

Same story. The Capitals are ranked 23rd with a dreary kill rate of 80.8% overall. But that’s an average of two disparate PK units.

The Caps are in the bottom five of special teams while on the road. Their home penalty kill is sterling — and has improved under Hunter, but they’re dragged down by a road unit that fails about once every four tries. There is no way to sugarcoat how bad the Caps are on the road when a man down, but maybe they could mitigate the problem by committing fewer penalties while away; they’re currently 16th in that stat.

Alex Ovechkin

And here’s the most curious thing. Alex Ovechkin, who by most accounts is in decline, seems to be slumping at home most of all. Just 6 of his 20 goals have come at Verizon Center.

Here are Alex’s average goals per game, shots per game, and shooting percentage.

Ovechkin is shooting 7.4% at home. A good deal of that is due to his scoring only one goal on 34 shots over 11 games under Boudreau. But even under Hunter, Ovechkin’s 10.6% is under his career average. It’s worth mentioning that Ovechkin has 9 more assists at home than he does on the road. Still, there is room for growth.

On the road, Ovechkin is playing more like his old self. He’s firing more shots (although not nearly enough for a former league leader), and he’s getting luckier with them. His 15.6% road shooting percentage isn’t Stamkos-ian, but it’s still pretty awesome.

Ovechkin has got to shoot more in both circumstances. Even if Ovi were to shoot his road average of 3.91 times per game, he’d still finish the season with the lowest shot total of his career. We really need him firing 5 or more on the net every single game.

And like the honey badger before him, Alex Ovechkin does not give a hoot about who his coach is. His scoring drought at home snapped under Hunter, but his road performance has been identical. If Boudreau was fired because he “lost” Alex Ovechkin, Hunter hasn’t effected a change in the captain.

Conclusions

The Capitals need to shoot more. Doesn’t matter if they’re at home or away, they just need to fire more pucks at the net. They’re in immediate danger of becoming the most harmless team in the NHL. At home under Coach Hunter, the team has lost its offensive passion. The road is hardly better, and the nadir was reached on January 18th when the Caps fired just 10 even-strength shots in Montreal. That they somehow won that game is  heartwarming, dumbfounding, and seductive. No team can sustain success without more offense.

The home power-play unit is elite, but the away power-play unit is awful. The penalty kill is the same, but there have been improvements under Dale Hunter. In the tight games that the new coach says he is keen to play, these goals will often be the margin of victory or defeat. And if the Caps can’t get their road PK unit crackling, they need to commit fewer penalties. We’re looking at you, Bad Sasha.

Beyond the road-versus-home stuff, there is a compelling but uncomfortable conclusion we have to reach: the Washington Capitals have gotten worse under Dale Hunter. His modest improvements on special teams have been offset by deflated by even-strength performance. This team stunned the NHL two years ago with the best offense since Detroit in ’06, but now they’re headed for dead last in shots on goal. If firing Boudreau was supposed to turn this team around quickly, it failed. If it is supposed to improve the team in the long term, the trend lines are heading in the wrong direction.

When we previewed the Caps schedule, we told you to put a big circle around the ides of March. There are three road games in four nights– and they’re against Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia– three of the league’s best teams. Those three games will come after the trade deadline, which is George McPhee‘s last chance to make a course correction for a wayward season. If the Caps can prove themselves in those games, we’ll know that this team is still capable of great things.

In the meantime, we need to figure out why it is that a talented team can have such trouble away from their home arena. Is it the off-ice amenities– like a short commute and mama’s home-cooking–  that make the difference? Could it be that the Caps are more acclimated to the notoriously harsh and groin-sundering ice conditions at Verizon Center? Is it the customary unleashing of fury that makes the Caps turn up the heat  or maybe the 5 or 6 times they play Pantera’s “Walk” over the PA every single game? Is it The Horn Guy? Is it Goat? Is it Wes?

I have no earthly idea, but I’d like to hear your opinion.

Why do the Caps struggle on the road? How can they fix it?

I would have liked to embed this Tenacious D video here, but there are like 20 billion naughty words in it. So with my stern NSFW warning, feel free to check it out. All data from NHL and Behind the Net. If you’d like to see my compiled dataset, let me know. And finally, this:

[Editors note: over the next month, we'll be looking at the challenges the Capitals face, the trade deadline, and the playoff chase. It's not gonna be fun, but we gotta do this.]

When Nick Backstrom took a blow to the head from Rene Bourque on January 3rd, the Capitals lost the service of their number-one center. Backstrom was on track for a better than 80-point season, which would have been a strong recovery from the slump of ’10-’11. Instead, the team lost the anchor for its top line and its most productive forward.

Without Backstrom, the Capitals have only three strong options for centers: Marcus Johansson, Brooks Laich, Jeff Halpern. Additionally, Mathieu Perreault, Cody Eakin, and Matt Hendricks have done center duty in a pinch. Meanwhile, the Capitals offense has  been shut out twice in the last three games and have averaged only 23 shots on goal since mid-December. That’s just not good enough.

Marcus Johansson is a talented skater who has a bright future, but he cannot be expected to put up more than 20 goals or 50 points so early in his career. He’s not yet the offensive presence that the first (or even second) line demands, and he’s still a liability on the face-off dot (winning a little over 43%).

Brooks Laich is a team leader and an admirably committed defensive forward. His penalty kill service– sometimes stickless– has distinguished him on the Capitals’ end of the ice, where he starts most shifts. But Brooks’ scoring output is flat this season (8G, 15A). Besides, he is only an ersatz centerman who has spent most of his career on the wing. Laich’s move to center — either on the 2nd or 3rd lines– was a move of necessity.

The once and current Capital Jeff Halpern is the third best face-off guy in the NHL (behind Pavelski and Toews). George McPhee may not have been looking for a replacement for Dave Steckel (who is ranked 5th) last summer, but he got one anyway. Halpern’s solidarity on the dot and modest offensive lean have made him one of the best surprises of the season, but he hasn’t been a top-6 forward in years.

Compare that to the Pittsburgh Penguins, a team notoriously strong up the middle: Jordan Staal, Sidney Crosby (when healthy), Evgeni Malkin, and even Tyler Kennedy supply the core of the Pittsburgh offense. It’s common wisdom that building a good hockey team starts from the center position, but the Capitals are hollow between their wings.

And the Capitals can’t look elsewhere in the organization for help. Keith Aucoin is certainly a future AHL Hall of Famer, but his NHL window has come and gone. Ryan Potulny has NHL experience at center but– at age 27– is in a situation similar to Aucoin. Mattias Sjogren threw a hissy fit last year and left North America. RMNB phenom Evgeny Kuznetsov is prolific, but he’s weak on the face-off and will require some adjustment to his defensive game when he makes the jump. The pipeline is not strong.

Since Sergei Fedorov left North America at the end of the 2009 season, the Capitals have been without a solid second line center. Now that Nick Backstrom is injured, the Ovechkin line is anchorless as well. Guys like Jason Arnott, Eric Belanger, Michael Nylander, Victor Kozlov, and Tomas Fleischmann yielded varying results at center and could not be sustained.

The Capitals have tried training Marcus Johansson on the job as a top line center. They tried moving Brooks Laich off of the wing. They tried giving the grinding expert Jeff Halpern a chance at the big time. Nothing has worked. The lack of viable centers on the Washington roster is George McPhee’s lasting disappointment. Now that the Washington Capitals are firing fewer shots than at any point since the lockout, the lack of a strong playmaking center is more pronounced than ever.

2011-2012 shot total is a projection based on shots through game 46.

Acquiring a center before the deadline will not be easy, and it will not come cheap. But it’s desperately needed for the immediate and long-term needs of this team.

What do you think McPhee should do?

Additional reporting by Ian Oland.