Week 21 Snapshot: Everything Falls Apart

Photo: Alex Brandon

There’s a stat called CHIP, as in salary Cap Hit of Injured Players. It measures the impact of injuries to a team based on how many games the players miss and how much they get paid. Up until recently, The Capitals had fared very, very well on the injury front this season. They had Dmitry Orlov and John Erskine missing from the blue line but were otherwise mostly unscathed. The Caps had one of the lowest CHIPs in the league.

Then March happened. Ovechkin missed a game, both Brookses are banged up, Peters got hurt, Latta is out, are and there’s a stomach bug going around. Just as the Capitals are mounting their final push for the playoffs, they’re all of a sudden a shambling mess.

Add to that the team’s performance since the all-star break (except for the week they roughed up the scrubs), and you’ve got some genuine worry about this team. They’re barely holding on to a playoff spot, and they’re one game away from squandering their longest home stand of the season.

It seems like everything’s broken for the Caps right now.

In this week’s snapshot, everything is fixable.

But first, Husker Du.

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, week 17, week 18, week 19, week 20

These are current as noon on Sunday, March 15. 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

• Despite the crummy games, the Capitals score-adjusted possession was surprisingly good overall this week, bringing the team to a cumulative 51.9 percent according to Puckon.net. Yes, the Buffalo game did inflate the totals, but there were two pitched (and unsuccessful) comeback attempts against the Rangers and Stars.
• It’s a complicated situation, and the overall shot-attempt differential doesn’t precisely capture it. The Caps were vastly outplayed twice. They dug themselves in holes, and then played pretty well in trying and failing to climb back out. It was a bad week for possession, but possession is not– and never is– the whole story.
• Because the Capitals just ain’t scoring. Since after the Buffalo game, they’ve been shooting 3.1 percent– way below league average (somewhere around 8 percent). Had the Caps got better bounces against Dallas and the Rangers, there’d be much less talk of panic right now. From my perspective, it’s really not so dire. I’m pretty confident the Caps will make the playoffs– though I’m an optimist. And besides, this is a great opportunity to take stock in where this team is goofing up.
• The Capitals seem to misunderstand their players’ profiles– or at least their deployment of those players conflicts with those players’ talents. For example, I love the top line of Alex Ovechkin, Nick Backstrom, and Marcus Johansson, but it stacks the decks, giving the Caps one great line with strong possession players while depriving the other three. Pat addressed this well in his Super WOWY post. This next graph, compiled by War on Ice, shows how the Capitals’ possession has changed when Ovechin is not playing. It’s gone off a cliff. (The uptick at the end is from Buffalo, Columbus, and the Leafs.)

• I had been and remain skeptical that Evgeny Kuznetsov is a strong possession player, but based on how the top six has been operating, I think he might be a better choice for the top line than Johansson. (Somewhere, Ian is smiling.) Kuznetsov is genuinely creative, so putting him in the offensive zone, where Backstrom and Ovechkin inexorably lead, might exploit that creativity while also minimizing the damage he can cause in the other two zones. And it frees up Johansson to do the hard work of carrying the through neutral on the second line, because it’s abundantly clear that Troy Brouwer‘s skill set is not clean breakouts, neutral-zone passes, or controlled zone entries.
• In general, I’d like to see each line have a strong possession guy (Backstrom, Johansson, Fehr, maybe Glencross, Latta) and fewer lines with multiple two-way players, wherein “two-way” is a polite euphemism for “this guy gets shelled.”
• I don’t have much to say about this, but I’m a little alarmed by the erosion of Joel Ward‘s game. He’s looking a bit like a two-way player. Same with Brooks Laich, who had a bad week even before he got hurt. The vets are letting Trotz down.
• Alex Ovechkin‘s goal differential in our sample is now 50 percent– dead even. It’s the goaltending. Ovechkin is seeing a team-worst 90.1 percent of opponent shots get saved (it’s only 0.2 better in all score situations). That’s unfortunate, but I’m not sure there’s anything to do about it other than scoff at folks who use that as evidence he shouldn’t win the Hart. He should totally win the Hart.
• If we’re making a list of all the stuff that has changed to bring the Caps down from the Cup contender they were in October to the bubble team they are now, I’d say the muting of Mike Green is number two, right after the stultifying predictability and slowness of the Caps’ transition game. Green is no longer seeing the best possession numbers among full-time defensemen; that’s Matt Niskanen, who has been killing it lately despite increased defensive assignments. I don’t think the problem with Green is limited to his defensive partners, though that is the biggest and most obvious variable. I am a bit worried that Green’s injury bug is biting again– at this, the worst time in the (regular) season. So much for Gleason protecting him– what a scam that line was.
• Nate Schmidt rules. His PDO does not. Though I do enjoy it when we get flooded with tweets whenever Schmidt makes a mistake.

@russianmachine Schmidt

— ktgold (@ktgold) March 12, 2015

https://twitter.com/obannon35/status/575814952918781952

https://twitter.com/TnSChurphy/status/575837025569472512

• The last week has given us an expanded glimpse as to what kind of player John Carlson is without Brooks Orpik. Goals-for percentage: 64.3; shot-attempts for percentage: 57.4. A wild supposition: if Carlson had a different full-time partner, given his play this season, he’d be a Norris favorite.
• If you wanna play around with CHIP and other luck factors, I recommend this tool, by your boy Rob Vollman. I find it comforting and helpful to remind myself that Nashville isn’t actually the greatest team of all time. The Caps are right in the middle by the way (stupid one-goal games).

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.