[Ed. note: RMNB alum Neil Greenberg now writes for The Washington Post and ESPN Insider. He offers this special contribution.]

Baseball was my first love. I grew up as a Mets fan. I could hop on the subway and be at Shea Stadium in minutes. I’d watch every game in my bedroom on a small color TV with tinfoil on the antennae for better reception. At the stadium I would chant, “Give it a ride, Darryl! Give it a ride!” while the organ played, and I consumed my weight in pretzels before the fifth inning. I still can’t watch replays of Game 6 without tearing up when the ball gets by Buckner.

I joined a few fantasy baseball leagues. One of them had 16 teams and a $2,500 entry fee. Big money and lots of fun.

Then I found the 1987 Bill James Baseball Abstract at the bookstore and my life changed.

I learned that numbers could see the future. I learned about “new” statistics like baserunner errors, quality starts, total average, on base + slugging, and runs created. Then, in the 1988 version, James cited workload-related burnout as the reason the Abstract would stop. Yes, stop. No mas. So I went on a quest, searching on my bike every used bookstore I could find to buy the Abstracts from 1977-1986. Eventually, I had them all. Every Bill James Baseball Abstract was mine. And I truly knew baseball.

I knew the batting lineups of every team, including their averages, home run totals, and home and away splits. I knew every pitching rotation’s ERA and WHIP like you know the alphabet. I knew the numbers, but lost interest in the game itself.

So I drifted.

As hockey consumed more of my attention, I had an epiphany: why couldn’t I apply some of what I learned from baseball to hockey? So I did, right in this very space.

I wrote about how the Capitals wouldn’t be scoring as much after 2009-10 because they had a ton of puck luck that year. I wrote about how Ovechkin’s scoring would decline and his contract would be an albatross around this organization’s neck for years to come.

I wrote about what we could expect from Mathieu Perreault and Eric Fehr.

I moved on to other outlets and kept writing about the numbers. Always the numbers. Never the game. And then I realized: the numbers are wrong. #fancystats are a sham. A lifeforce-sucking, mood-dampening, hypocritical sham. Stats may fill column inches, but they will never tell you about a player’s heart. Ultimately, they just get in the way of what the sport really is.

You can’t boil this game down to 1s and 0s. It isn’t played on a spreadsheet. You can’t know for certain that Minnesota wouldn’t make the playoffs because they had too much puck luck. You can’t know that a strong puck-possession team like Los Angeles would upset Vancouver in the first round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. You can’t know that Ovechkin likely won’t score 60 goals again. And you can’t discount how much wanting to beat the other team plays into wins and losses.

And that’s the hard lesson I have learned: this game is won or lost from the heart. Not by scoring goals or outshooting the competition. Not by acronyms or Excel formulas, but by wanting it more than the other guy.

I know that now. And with more time to watch the games I am going to be looking for that player that gives 110 percent at just the right time in order to put his team over the top.

Just like I did as a child.

Follow Neil Greenberg at @ngreenberg on Twitter and Fancystats on Facebook.

I have no idea who the Washington Capitals are. We are exactly halfway into the 2013 season, and the team seems to change identities on pace with the weather. After one of the slowest starts in memory, the Caps put forth some pretty stirring wins in late February. But now in March, the team seems poised to miss the postseason for the first time since 2007– unless they can turn things around.

This article takes stock of the Capitals’ first half and asks what the back half could look like. Plus like 7 megs of Game of Thrones GIFs.

Summary

There’s a lot here, and while I tried to bold all the salient stuff, here’s a quick summary in case you don’t wanna scour the whole article. I won’t be offended if you bail after these bullet points, but the GIFs are pretty crucial too.

• The Caps don’t appear to be playoff-bound this year. How will the front office respond? 
• The Caps are a bottom-10 possession team, but their performance when winning is encouraging.
• Goaltending has leveled out, but the Caps have to learn how to win even when Holtby isn’t stupendous.
• The power play is either magic or lucky. Let’s root for magic.
• The Caps penalty kill is both bad and overworked. The Caps have to commit fewer penalties or the PK will cost more games.
• The Caps can expect better puck luck, but that won’t be enough to turn their fate around.
• Mike Ribeiro’s faceoff performance is not up-to-snuff for a first-line center, and it’s probably cost Alex Ovechkin goals already.
• Recent play from Joel Ward, Eric Fehr, and Nick Backstrom should inspire some line shuffling.

Standings

As of Sunday afternoon, the Capitals have 21 points. That puts them 6 points out of 8th place (with one fewer game played than NJD). Carolina leads the Southleast Division with 29 points– a spread of 4 regulation wins. By the time you read this, those gaps may have grown.

Sports Club Stats puts the Caps’ chances of making the postseason under 15%.

If the season ended today, well, first everyone would be like “what happened to the second half of the season?” But also, the Caps would be in contention for the number-one draft pick.

This puts the Caps front office in an awkward position. They can mount an honest effort to make the playoffs (something Ted Leonsis said the team should be able to do for the next decade), or they can rebuild for next year. Rebuilding would mean becoming “sellers” at the deadline– i.e. trading away players to contending teams in exchange for high future returns. The worst possible scenario is that the Capitals try to make the playoffs– signing additional players at a premium– and then fail. Last year the Caps saw little or no return for free agents Alex Semin and Dennis Wideman. They can’t afford to let that happen with Mike Ribeiro.

Possession

There is no better predictor of success than how a team possesses the puck. It’s more accurate than both goal differential and standings. According to behindthenet.ca, when the game is close, we know the Capitals send 47% of shots towards the opposition’s net. That ranks them 22nd in the league. For reference, the top-5 possession teams are LA, St Louis, Boston, Chicago, and the Rangers. (One of those teams is gonna win the Cup if you ask me.)

In a weird happenstance, the Capitals are actually the league’s second-best team when they’ve got a big lead. Teams usually sit back with a two-goal lead, but the Capitals have a hunger for scoar moar goals. That is a great sign. If the Caps can tap into that confidence all the time, they will become a much, much stronger team.

Goaltending

Okay, so this one is weird. The Capitals have the eighth-worst goals-against average in the league, stopping all but 72 of the 753 shots their goaltenders have seen. But that’s not the whole story.

Braden Holtby has started 16 of 24 games so far and posted a .909 Sv% in all of his appearances. That’s average. Dialing in a little closer, we see that Holtby was a pretty awful goaltender in the season’s first 10 games, and among the league’s best since then. So where is Holtby’s actual talent level? What can we expect from him in the future?

Dunno yet. It’s somewhere between the two extremes. We cannot expect him to stop 19 out of every 20 shots like he did during his 11-game streak, and the Capitals can’t depend on that level of play to win games. Caps goaltenders have provided 10 quality starts so far, and those games represent all but three of the Caps’ wins.

Regardless: the Caps still have two cheap goalies who play around league average. While goaltending burned them early in the season, the Caps’ fortune in the back  half will have less to do with the guy in net and more to do with the five guys in front of him.

Special Teams

Let’s start with penalties, because I think that’s the more telling stat. While penalties are up overall, the Capitals have truly distinguished themselves with 101 minor penalties, the 10th highest in the league. Jason Chimera seems to be leading that charge, taking about two penalties per every 60 minutes played.

On the flip side, the Caps see the 7th fewest power plays in the league, a side effect of low puck possession and also a multi-national, far-reaching conspiracy by the NHL and referees to screw the Caps over at every turn. Alex Ovechkin continues to be a huge generator of power plays, drawing 2.4 per every 60 minutes he is on the ice.

The Caps have insane-o power play numbers. They convert more than one-quarter of their power plays, good for 3rd best in the league, but they’re not really generating more shots than their peers. The Caps fire about 0.8 shots per minute on PP, just 17th best in the league. That suggests that Caps PP conversion rate won’t stay among the league’s best unless Adam Oates’s 5-on-4 tactics continue to be magic.

The Washington penalty kill is digging its way out of a very deep hole. They have the second worst PK in the league, killing just 75.5% of man-down situations. No team has more power play goals against than the Capitals, which is why the Caps desperately need to commit fewer penalties. One way to do that, not at all incidentally, is to possess the puck more. If the Caps can limit their shorthanded time (via fewer dumb penalties by Mike Ribeiro for example) and can cohere their penalty kill strategy, they’ll see these numbers improve, and they will win more games.

Luck

Some people take umbrage at the term luck. To those people luck dismisses individual effort and makes the game a cold calculation. I don’t think most stat geeks actually think this way at a micro level, but if you have that hang-up, try using the term “non-repeatable skill”  instead. It’s still a fantastic achievement to score on 3 out of 4 shots or to earn a shutout, but we can’t expect a player to do that every game. Hence: luck.

Once more, we measure luck through a proxy called PDO, which we now pretend stands for “percentage-driven output” even though it doesn’t. PDO is just your shooting percentage (averaging around 9%) plus your save percentage (averaging around 91%). It basically explains away plus-minus (individually) or goal differential (for a whole team) as being the result of a lot of short term craziness that doesn’t really shake out in long stretches. On a long timeline, teams end up with a PDO right around 1000, which is why the number of shots (i.e. possession) is more valuable than conversion rates when predicting how the last 24 games of this season will go.

As of last week, the Capitals had a PDO of 992, making them the ninth unluckiest team in the league. Much of that deficit is attributable to a below-average shooting percentage (we’re looking at you, Jason Chimera), though the team’s suckiness in net earlier also hurt them. The good news is we can expect the Capitals to get better bounces as time goes on, but that alone isn’t going to get the Capitals into the playoffs– and it’s definitely not a foundation to build a team off in the long run.

Faceoffs

I haven’t been paying enough attention to faceoffs this season, and I’m sorry for that. After seasons of watching Boyd Gordon and Dave Steckel win 6 outta 10, I guess I got spoiled. Nick Backstrom is winning 53% of his faceoffs, but he’s taking most of them in the defensive zone. Meanwhile, first-line center Mike Ribeiro is winning just 43% of his faceoffs, and he’s taking 54% of them right near the opponent’s net.

Let’s consider that more closely. Mike Ribeiro, Alex Ovechkin’s assigned pivot, wins just 40% of his faceoffs in the offensive zone. Shooting percentage actually spikes up right after a faceoff win, so Ovechkin is getting deprived of opportunities to score. It might behoove Oates to give Ovechkin and Backstrom some more offensive-zone shifts together; it might do wonders for both of them.

Deployment

Robert Vollman at Hockey Abstract packages these terrific charts that visualize how Caps players are playing relative to their assignments. Here’s how that data looked as of the morning of March 9th:

Players in the top-left are facing tough assignments. Players in the bottom right are sheltered. Big and blue circles are good. Big and red circles are bad. You can see more player usage charts on Some Kind of Ninja.

We’ve already talked about Marcus Johansson, so let’s just skip over that poor-possession elephant in the locker room. It appears that Ovi and Ribeiro are being effectively shut down despite getting favorable deployments, whereas the team’s bottom 6 seem to be kicking ass with somewhat tougher jobs (although let’s not pretend that defenders are playing Ward and Fehr in any way comparable to Alex Ovechkin).

Among forwards, Ward and Fehr are the big achievers, and frankly both deserve promotions to the top six (where Fehr has been for the last week). Joey Crabb’s continued absence from the press box is a continued mystery to me, although we should acknowledge that he is taking lots of defensive shifts. Nick Backstrom is as dependable as a rock, but his scoring is also eerily rock-like. He could use some kind of change. (If you haven’t detected that my agenda is to put Ovechkin and Backstrom together yet, you haven’t been reading closely.)

On D, it’s time we released John Carlson from the doghouse. Together or apart from Karl Alzner, Carlson has been driving play against some of the league’s best players. That he has been on ice for so many goals against is probably just a funny artifact of bad luck and small sample size. Carlson is a stud, plus he no longer looks like that kid in 8th grade who discovered Pantera and then stopped cutting his hair.

Conclusions

I don’t think the Caps will make the playoffs. The team’s fundamentals just aren’t strong enough for us to expect them to catch up to Carolina. Instead of frittering away team assets for a doomed playoff push, they should be sellers at the deadline and begin assembling a kick-ass team for 2013-2014– with Evgeny Kuznetsov and Filip Forsberg not far behind.

Special teams will be a big X-factor from here on out. The PP will probably cool down, and the Caps will have to be a lot more disciplined to keep their PK unit from being overworked. A lot of that performance stems from Adam Oates and his coaching staff– who will have to be both vigilant and reactive to keep the power play plugging and reinvigorate the penalty kill.

No context. Just including this one because Sophie Turner is so pretty.

Performance data suggest that the Caps aren’t optimizing their lines effectively. Strong players are being scratched in favor of weak players, and the team’s best scorer is playing with a bad faceoff guy instead of the team’s best possession forwards. What the Caps have tried so far isn’t working, so it’s time to shake things up.

One thing I didn’t address is injury. It’s hard to quantify. The Caps are now without the services of Mike Green, and they haven’t seen Brooks Laich all year. Both are strong players, and both can contribute to the weaknesses I identified above– though it’d be naive to think the distance between the Caps and the Cup is just the 6’2″ frame of Brooks Laich. It’s bigger.

So that’s a whole lot of numbers, a whole lot of opinion, and a whole lot of Tyrion Lannister. Below, please tell me where I’m wrong, if you think the Caps can make the postseason, and what you think they can do to make the back half better than the front.

Photo credit: Flickr / catrinamariee

[Editor's note: Over the next however long, we'll be pondering a few ways to brighten up the hockey world. Sometimes silly, sometimes not: here are our proposals for the 2012-2013 season... whenever that may happen.]

Goals, assists, plus-minus. That’s supposed to be how you tell how good a hockey player is. When a skater’s name pops up on the CSN-Washington chyron, they show goals, assists, and plus-minus. ESPN, Yahoo, and NHL.com place plus-minus among their marquee stats for ranking players. But the more we learn about hockey and statistics, the more we know that plus-minus kind of sucks at measuring talent.

Proposal: This season, let’s throw out the plus-minus stat. In this article I’m gonna tell you why I think plus-minus has gotta go, and I’m gonna pitch a stat to replace it.

Plus-minus is a running count of a player’s goal differential. When the player’s team scores, he gets a +1; when the opposition scores, he gets a -1. There are exceptions for shorthanded and power play goals, but that’s the basic idea. Ostensibly, plus-minus is supposed to tell us the net effect a player has on his team’s fortune — as measured in goals. But it doesn’t really do that.

Plus-minus is really a team stat: measuring a player’s ability to some uncertain extent, but moreso measuring the strength of everyone on ice– with a whole lot of random chance factored in too. For example, while Jeff Schultz certainly played well in 2009-10, he was probably not the greatest player in league. But according to plus-minus, he was– leading the NHL with a monster plus-50. We Caps fans know that Jeff (who, I repeat, still played terrifically) benefited tremendously from an explosive Capitals offense (seven 20+ goal scorers), and they were lucky at shooting and stingy in net while he was on the ice.

Manny Malhotra is a victim of plus/minus.

On the other end of the spectrum we have the curious case of Manny Malhotra in Vancouver. In 2011-12 Manny posted a team-worst minus-11, but that’s not because he’s a bad hockey player. It’s actually the opposite: Coach Alain Vigneault trusted Malhotra with an astoundingly large number of faceoffs in the defensive zone (87.6%), allowing the Sedin brothers to take all the tasty ones right near the opponent’s net. In this case, Malhotra’s crummy plus-minus represents neither his talent (as the stat purports) or his team’s performance/luck (as in the case of Jeff Schultz), but rather the peculiar and successful way that player is deployed by his coach.

Aside from the examples of Manny and Jeff, plus/minus is totally hosed by dumb luck. Remember when the Capitals outshot Montreal by miles back in the 09-10 playoffs (WSH had 80 more shots and misses than MTL over 7 games), but they lost anyway? That’s because their shooting percentage was atrocious (or because Halak played like a god, whatever). Washington’s skaters in that series demonstrated all the behaviors that should lead to success in the long term, but they still got clowned by the tiny little sample (and Halak, yes, stop saying his name). Specifically there’s a fella like Alex Semin, who personally fired 44 shots in that series (which usually would be good for 3-4 goals by an average shooter or 6 from a stone-cold sniper like Semin) but instead ended up without a single goal– and a dreary even plus-minus. Shouldn’t our stat better represent the habits that lead to success rather than the vagaries of luck?

From Justin Bourne’s Systems Analyst post

Of course. So it should not have surprised us back in 2009 when Timo Seppa at Hockey Prospectus declared plus-minus as a “nonsense stat.” Or when Ryan Lambert at Puck Daddy lambasted Coach Hunter for benching Mike Knuble based on a bad plus-minus. Or when Driving Play revealed the way-too-high impact of empty netters on the stat. Or when Justin Bourne revealed its flimsiness during line changes. And so on. And so on.

There are certainly examples of excellent players with excellent plus-minus stats, but in those cases we often see similar representation by underlying numbers (the fearsome #fancystats) as well. If we are going to get rid of plus-minus, maybe we should replace it with one of those.

Our criteria for the stat to replace plus-minus are pretty straightforward:

1. We want a stat that describes a player’s contribution to the team.
2. We want to communicate that contribution using a single number.
3. We want it to be easy to understand by casual fans.
4. We want it to have a snazzy name.

It’d be nice if our magic stat eliminates the effects of shooting luck and deployment, but that would make it kind of like the holy grail/unobtanium/triforce/Katana fleet of advanced stats; I’ll settle for just doing a better job than plus-minus for now.

Maybe the most obvious candidate for a replacement stat would be a possession stat like Fenwick or Corsi. These two plus-minus-type stats count even-strength shots and misses (Corsi includes blocked shots too). Because shooting percentage doesn’t distort possession stats, Jeff Schultz wouldn’t see his numbers quite so blown up, but guys like Manny Malhotra would still look like a bum since he spends so much time in his own team’s zone. We might just have to live with that.

Like goal differential, Fenwick and Corsi are also expressed as a plus-minus, which essentially makes them counting stats– so a pretty good player that plays a lot may look better than a great one who hasn’t played as much (See: Martin Brodeur). For that reason I’d prefer if we expressed it as a ratio: the user’s Fenwick score divided by the total number of Fenwick events while that player is on the ice. So instead of just saying “Brooks Laich has a plus-38 Fenwick score this season,” we would say “Brooks Laich drives 50.5% of his team’s puck possession.” (Note: Because of the level of competition, this percentage would floats darn near 50% with extremes of around 40 and 60%.)

And here’s the part where we really sex it up: Instead of calling it something obscure like Fenwick or explaining how possession works, we can just call it Ice Tilt: “Brooks Laich is tilting the ice 54.6% in the right direction.” When he’s on the ice, the puck just seems to gravitate towards the other guy’s net– as if the ice were literally tilted that way. And it’s easy to comprehend: over 50 is happy and under 50 is sad.

Back in 09-10, Jeff Schultz wouldn’t have led the league in Ice Tilt (other hockey geeks have long used similar stats with names like FenF%), he would have ranked 151st with a 52.2% (stats from David Johnson’s hockeyanalysis.com). Doesn’t that seem a bit more in perspective to you?

Of course, Malhotra still gets screwed using Ice Tilt, ranking 19 out of 20 on the Canucks with 41.5%, so this is in no way a perfect solution. Deployment and quality of competition are still going to wreak havoc on Ice Tilt.

But despite its problems, Ice Tilt would be a great way to put plus-minus to bed. And it would be pretty cool if CSN would snapshot a player like this:

Alex Ovechkin (37 G, 47 A, 55.4% Ice Tilt)

If you’re curious, here’s how the 2011-2012 Capitals (minimum of 300 minutes) looked using Ice Tilt.

There are still bunches of shortfalls with using possession stats alone (the aforementioned Malhotra effect in particular), but I think it’s plainly superior to plus-minus. It’s pretty easy to understand and less distorted by luck. Plus, Ice Tilt is a pretty sexy name, and it immediately paints a picture of what it means. It’s still going to wobble from game-to-game, but I’m just throwing out ideas here.

The last few years have seen smart research by smart people on better ways to measure player talent and contribution. Scoring chances (laboriously tallied by folks like WaPo’s Neil Greenberg) and zone entries (which may be the big statistical breakthrough of the next year) inch us towards the ultimate goal: an objective, undistorted, and straightforward way to communicate player talent. We’re not there yet, but I think an incremental step like Ice Tilt would be good progress.

So anyway, that’s my thought– possession percentage instead of goal differential. If you’ve got a better idea or just want to call me names, use the comments below. If you’ve got your own idea for another proposal, let’s hear that too. We’ve got a lot more coming!

For the record, Ice Tilt as I’ve shown it here is David Johnson’s FenF% during 5v5, close score, adjusted for zone starts by removing events in the first 10 seconds after faceoff.

Before Moneyball (the book, not the movie), there was Bill James.

For those of you who may not know, James is the grandfather of Sabermetrics (baseball #fancystats) and is currently a senior advisor on baseball operations for the Boston Red Sox.

Part of my personal #fancystats book collection

He began writing The Bill James Baseball Abstract in 1977 which was “the first of its kind to scientifically analyze and study baseball, often through the use of statistical data, in an attempt to determine why teams win and lose.”

Luckily, Hockey Prospectus is there to carry the torch into the Moneypuck era.

Since I got their inaugural copy last year I have been waiting for Hockey Prospectus to make their 2011-12 annual available. Finally, I got to download it last week.

For those not familiar, the book is, for the most part, an in-depth analysis of each NHL team. It certainly has a #fancystats element to it, so those who love stats will enjoy it. But make no mistake: this is for anyone interested increasing their knowledge of hockey, sounding smarter on Twitter or just as a guideline for expectations for the 2011-12 season.

For example, here’s a look at some of the Washington Capitals content:

 This team is pretty loaded with offensive talent, and just needs to take advantage of it. For instance, the second-best player in the world, Alexander Ovechkin, cannot possibly be worse than he was last season, can he? Expect the most physically dominant player in the world to at least eclipse 45 goals next season.

His linemate Nicklas Backstrom did not have an impressive season or playoff campaign. Some suspected Backstrom was playing with the weight of his contract extension on his shoulders, which may be true, but he also faced tougher competition and was put in less favorable offensive situations. Combine that with his poor shooting percentage, and it is at least a partial explanation for his offensive totals. With some favorable bounces, and increased intensity (he lost a lot of puck battles during the playoffs, seemingly looking lazy at times), there is no reason he should not bounce back to be a top NHL scorer.

There are also projections for every player. Here is friend of the blog Andrew Gordon’s who hopes to catch on with Anahaim:

I even used their VUKOTA projections to draft in my ESPN league.

And lastly, there are some great essays, including revisiting Corsi, Timo Seppa’s Ultimate Faceoff Percentage and how age affects a player’s development.

The PDF version is $10 bucks (also available on Amazon) and is money well spent. Just think, you’ll be able to tell people “before Moneypuck, there was Hockey Prospectus.”