The Capitals are 1-4-1.  They’re in 14th place in the Eastern Conference, 7 standings points behind the Southeast Division-leading Tampa Bay Lightning.

I’m not panicking.

Despite how desperate the standings look, the Capitals are actually playing darn good hockey right now according to their underlying numbers. Let’s take a look at those together and then have a warm glass of milk.

Possession vs Luck

Let’s start with this old yarn: puck possession is a strong predictor of future success, and the Capitals’ possession numbers are both good and improving. But the team is unlucky.

This table shows running averages of even-strength shot percentage (EV SF/[EV SF + EV SA]) and PDO compared to the averages for each. I’m using percentage of shots on goal rather than true Fenwick data (which includes misses) because timeonice.com isn’t publishing that data yet.

The red line shows the Capitals with above-average possession numbers, but bad puck luck, represented by the blue line. PDO combines a team’s shooting percentage and save percentage and operates as a proxy for luck.

Although the Caps are playing fundamentally strong hockey, the pucks just aren’t bouncing the right way yet. In six games, the Capitals have had just one where their PDO was above 1000, the 3-2 win over Buffalo.

Individually, The Caps have just 5 players above 1000 PDO: Joel Ward, Jason Chimera, Mike Ribeiro, John Erskine, and Jay Beagle. For contrast, San Jose has 15 players above 1000. The other Caps players have seen remarkably poor on-ice shooting percentages, below-average goaltending, or– in most cases– both.

(Fast fact: Caps goalies have so far been perfect while Joel Ward is on the ice.)

While it’s not good news for Ward and Erskine, we should see those these numbers normalize eventually. The lower-performing players will start shooting better (while their goalie duffs it less), and the team’s overall numbers will rebound. That alone will factor into a few wins.

Power Play and Penalty Kill

Then there’s the Caps’ special-teams performance. The Caps are 4 for 25 on the power play, a 16% conversion rate that ranks them 22nd in the league. Their penalty kill has allowed 9 goals in 30 shorthanded situations, a 70% kill rate that ranks them 25th in the league.

Both of those figures are bad, but I believe that both will improve as coach Adam Oates has time to tune and acclimate his players to the new formulations. That’s a subjective reading, but I think it makes sense.

That said, the team’s 30 penalty-kill situations puts them in a four-way tie for 28th most in the league– a number out of joint with their possession (the team with the puck rarely commits the penalty). If that penalty rate goes down, the team’s crumminess while a man down will matter less.

Alex Ovechkin

And then there’s the Great 8, who has been criticized mightily (even by us) in this young season.

Alex Ovechkin has taken 20 shots so far and scored just one goal. But based on his average shooting average (about 12%), he should have scored about two and a half goals. It’s not a huge gap, but two Caps losses so far have been in one-goal games. We can expect Ovechkin’s shooting percentage to improve as the season progresses.

Still, Ovechkin is slightly off his shooting pace from last year– about half a shot per game. That’s no big deal in such a small sample, but it serves as a reminder that he’s taking half as many shots as he did back when he won trophies. Sure, with a little bit of luck (and maybe an NHL-caliber center at his flank), Ovechkin can bounce back to his scoring levels from last year, but he’ll need a dramatic offensive push to counteract aging effects and break through that plateau.

Goaltending

Finally, one thing we should keep an eye on is goalie performance. Robert Vollman at Hockey Abstract concocted a metric called Quality Starts. It’s basically a threshold that evaluates whether a goalie has given his team a good chance to win the game. The Capitals have had just one quality start so far– Michal Neuvirth’s effort vs. Buffalo. The rest of the time, independent of offensive effort, the Caps have had just a 25% chance to win the game.

But I really don’t believe the Capitals goalies are .900 Sv% talent, so those numbers should improve as well. They’ve gotta, as the Caps are going to need much better goaltending  (and team defense) if they’re gonna get more wins out of the short season.

And that’s the rub: it is a short season, one in which luck will have a stronger influence than usual. I really do think these Capitals are a playoff team, but it might take more than faith in progression to the mean to make it happen.

For more on why it isn’t time to panic, read Neil Greenberg’s item today in the Washington Post.

Photo credit: Mitchell Layton

Fan-favorite Jeff Halpern, who captained the Washington Capitals during the 2005-06 season, was signed this offseason to a one-year deal for $825,000.

Last year Halpern logged the second-most shorthanded minutes (2:20) per-game among Montreal’s forwards and also finished second on the team in faceoff percentage (56.9%). His 11 goals and 26 points were his most since the lockout ended, and he is expected to center the fourth line and see time on the penalty kill.

“He got 26 points last year, which is more than we got out of that position last year,” General Manager George McPhee said when Washington signed Halpern in July. “We want players to be able to fulfill certain roles but also generate offense.”

At the risk of being sacrilegious I am here to say, please, keep your expectations low. Very low.

Remember back in October of 2010 when I cautioned fans the Caps could have trouble converting shots into goals? It was based on the metric PDO, which is the summation of a player’s on-ice shooting percentage and on-ice save percentage during 5v5.

What makes PDO predictive is twofold:

1. It is typically unsustainable year to year.
2. It regresses to a central value of 1000, both up and down.

When Halpern was on the ice at even strength last season, Montreal saw a shooting percentage of 10.12 percent and a save percentage of .930 for a PDO of 1031, good for 20th best among NHL forwards who played at least 40 games last season. Only about 40 NHLers have a PDO in excess of 1030 each year.

In 2008-09 the Boston Bruins had 5 players in the Top 10 for PDO, and then NONE in the Top 100 in 2009-10. The Caps had 6 of the Top 10 and 13 of the Top 15 in 2009-10 but ended up with only one in the Top 10 and only six in the Top 100 last season.

See where I am going with this?

It is unlikely that Halpern sees as much “puck luck” on the ice next season, especially with linemates like Jay Beagle, D.J. King, and Matt Hendricks. I’d bet on single-digit goals and assists from the Potomac, MD native as he helps fill the void left by Boyd Gordon.

“I’ve always kind of hoped to come back to Washington– and the fact that they called, I was ecstatic,” Halpern said at Kettler Capitals Iceplex.

No matter what happens in 2011-12, fans are too.

Alex Ovechkin, inches away from a potential goal against New Jersey. (Photo credit: Clydeorama)

I know there are some out there that don’t put much faith in statistics and feel it is a small step up from voodoo, but when a metric like PDO is an incredibly strong predictive tool for individual players, it deserves some notice.

First, what is PDO and what does it stand for? PDO, as far as I can tell, is an acronym penned by Vic Ferrari without any explanation as to what the letters mean. It is the summation of a team’s or a player’s on-ice shooting percentage and on-ice save percentage during 5v5. For example, last season the Caps shot 12.43% and their goalies had a save percentage of 94.5% when Jeff Schultz was on the ice at even strength. 12.43 + 94.5 = 106.9, which is referred to as a PDO of 1069. Incidentally, Schultz led the league last year in PDO.

What makes the number predictive is twofold:

1. It is typically unsustainable year to year.
2. It regresses to a central value of 1000, both up and down.

A recent example of how this works on the team level is the Boston Bruins. In 2008-9 they had 5 players in the Top 10 for PDO, and then NONE in the Top 100 in 2009-10.

What does this have to do with the Caps? They had 6 of the Top 10 last year and 13 of the Top 15 among skaters with 20+ games played. This would indicate that they could have trouble converting shots into goals in 2010-11, or feel “the puck has just been bouncing and hopefully it’s going to bounce our way soon.”

Still unconvinced? Take a look at how players do the following year as a group based solely on the previous year’s PDO:

(Data is from Behind the Net. I looked at the year to year change for 946 skaters over the last 3 years where there was paired data available.)

Maybe it is just a slow start keeping this high octane offense on the side of the road. Maybe the puck is going to start bouncing their way soon. Or maybe this is why the only Washington Capital I took in my fantasy league was Alex Ovechkin.