Week 17 Snapshot: If You Don’t Like the Lines

There’s a great Mark Twain quote about weather in New England, but it sort of applies to how the Caps organize their forwards. If you don’t like the lines, just wait a few minutes.

Barry Trotz’s forward lines, which I’ve been tracking all season, get announced once or twice a day– at practice or morning skate and during warmups before games. And each time they’re followed by a chorus of criticism from professional and amateur hockey watchers, including me.

There’s always something to rail against: the guy on Alex Ovechkin’s opposite wing, who’s getting stuck on the fourth line, which pairings don’t work, who deserves a scratch but isn’t getting one, and who deserves a sweater but isn’t getting one. It’s instant fodder for content, fresh grist for the anguish mill, and an easy conversation starter.

But it’s also sort of cheap. Because there is no optimal line combination for Barry Trotz. If twenty of us were to make up our ideal lines, I doubt any two would match. There is no magic Rubik’s cube of forwards that make everyone love him and shut up. It just doesn’t exist. The lines are a loser every time, and Trotz, a coaching veteran with three decades of experience, knows it.

Every day he’s got to set back a rookie or piss off a forward. He’s got to give a sweater to a player he’d rather see traded, and maybe he’s thinking about how great some other player on some other team might be in that same spot. Even MacLellan has limited control over his roster considering the market forces and freak injuries that determine it.

That doesn’t mean we should hush up about the lines. I think we’ve got an exceptionally informed and passionate community here. We all know what it means for Evgeny Kuznetsov’s development when he takes shifts with Jason Chimera, and we should talk about it. (Though I bet Barry Trotz probably already knows as well.)

While it’s good for us to discuss and debate it, I’m going to always try to acknowledge that the lines will never be totally perfect and they’ll never be totally broken.

In this week’s snapshot, we explore the great space between those two extremes.

Previous snapshots: week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4, week 5, week 6, week 7, week 8, week 9, week 10, week 11, week 12, week 13, week 14, week 15, week 16

Let’s do the numbers. These are current as noon on Sunday, February 15th, though you’re not reading this until Monday or Tuesday because of the late games. The sample is restricted to 5v5 hockey when the score is within one goal. There’s a glossary at bottom with an explanatory video.

Forwards

Defense

Observations

• The Caps won two out of four in the last week, but it wasn’t a good seven days when measured in shot differential. According to Puckon.net, the Caps’ puck possession dropped by half a possession point, from 52.6 percent down to 52.1. That’s a drop of two points, which I guess isn’t so bad when you consider the Caps played three good teams and one Philadelphia Flyers team.
• One of my favorite trios– that of Brooks Laich, Eric Fehr, and Joel Ward— has been in decline of late. They had a truly horrendous game against LA (sub-20 percent possession). If you look at Ward and Laich, they’re sporting team-low on-ice goal percentages, which is either a serious problem or an artifact of luck. I think/hope it’s the latter; I still believe this is a good line, though perhaps it’s too good.
• Because, apart from a shining effort in LA, the line of Evgeny Kuznetsov, Jason Chimera, and Troy Brouwer continues to be the Capitals’ worst according to the snapshot. This is not Trotz’s shutdown line (Fehr’s is), but the Kuzy line is playing like they’re expected to get bombarded by pucks. These guys need a stronger possession player– maybe Johansson or Latta– to help them out.
• Three players have about the same shot-attempt percentage (SA%) inside our sample (5v5 when the score is within 1 goal). Therefore, according to absolutely no one, they must be the same quality of player. We’re talking about Marcus Johansson, Eric Fehr, and Jay Beagle. This is a good chance to illustrate how statistics start conversations, not end them. So if you change the sample from “within one goal” to all of 5v5, Johansson, jumps to 52.5 percent, Fehr drops to 50.5, and Beagle drops even further to 49.3. A similar effect happens if you adjust for the score. If you compare how the Caps do when each player is on or off the ice, Johansson looks better again– he improves the differential, whereas Fehr barely changes it, and Beagle hurts it. Individually, Fehr and Johansson drastically outshoot Beagle. Fehr gets the tougher zone starts and faces better competition, but Johansson is also a crucial part of the power play. Three very different players for whom many of us have very different opinions, and if we were to just stop at shot-attempt differential– which no one actually does— we’d miss all the interesting stuff. Here’s these three identical players, using all snapshot data:
  

  	Shot Attempts	Goals	Rel. Possession	5v5 TOI/GM
  Johansson	+15 (356-341)	-2 (21-23)	+1.5%	11.7
  Fehr	+16 (358-342)	-2 (16-18)	-0.1%	12.8
  Beagle	+13 (302-289)	+5 (20-15)	-1.8	10.6

• Heyyyy Andre Burakovsky. He’s scored three goals on seven shots in the last two games he’s spent on the top line. He’s seeing the Caps own a team-high number of shot attempts when he’s on the ice. He looks to have genuine chemistry with Alex Ovechkin (insofar as Burra knows to get to the slot when Ovechkin goes Rambo-style into the offensive zone). I bet we’ll see more from Andre in Pittsburgh on Tuesday. The question for me is what that means for Tom Wilson, who, despite 21 games on the top line, is looking more and more like the washout we long feared he might be.
• Imagine where on the league assist-leader list Nick Backstrom would be if his PDO were higher than 98.1. Answer: probably nowhere. The trouble is on the other end of the ice, where Caps goalies are saving just 89.8 of shots inside our sample.
• I actually really really liked Aaron Volpatti‘s two performances this season– both of them against the Kings, who were bad one night and good the other (a mirror image of Washington). Rumor has it Volpatti was playing while hurt during his much-maligned 2013-14 season, which might be just as bad as playing while being coached by Adam Oates. I want to see more.
• The NHL will debut its new advanced stat site at the end of the week. The big question to me is how they will package and present them. Will the NHL adopt, formally, the “Corsi” title for shot-attempt differential and shot-attempt percentage? Who is their intended audience? Will they allow for filtering by date? Will they come anywhere close to the data and features on War-On-Ice? Will they embrace microformats? Will they use colspans that make the data hard to copy and scrape? Will the data be used in contract arbitration? So many questions, and here’s a picture of a corgi just because.
  
• Finally: Latta rules, Hillen doesn’t, I’m out. /drops mic.

Glossary

• 5v5 Within 1. Our sample. The portions of games when each team has five skaters and the score is within one goal.
• GP. Games played.
• TOI. Time on ice. The amount of time that player played during 5v5 close.
• SA%. Shot-attempt percentage, a measurement for puck possession. The share of shot attempts that the player’s team got while he was on the ice. Also known as Fenwick. Above 50 percent is good.
• Goal%. Goal percentage. The share of goals that the player’s team got while he was on the ice. Above 50 percent is good.
• PDO. A meaningless acronym. The sum of a player’s on-ice shooting percentage and his goalies’ on-ice save percentage. Above 100 means the player is getting fortunate results that may reflected in goal%.
• ZS%. Offensive zone start percentage. Excluding neutral-zone starts, the share of shifts that the player starts in the offensive zone, nearer to the opponent’s net.

Thanks to War On Ice for the stats and being generally awesome.