Domination Consumes You: Week 17 Snapshot

Photo: Keith Allison

The Washington Capitals got embarrassed by the Dallas Stars on Saturday night.

While the Caps are running away with the division lead and are consensus favorites to win the President’s Trophy for most regular-season points, the Stars are the most exciting team in the league. They’re locked in a duel with the Hawks for the Central Division lead and they’re unbelievably fun. Led by the league’s best scoring tandem in Benn and Seguin. the Stars have an aggressive offense, generating oodles of shots and globs of goals. They look a lot like the pre-2011 Capitals, really.

We all recall how those scoar-moar-goals Caps got handled in the postseason, but their dominance in the 82-game regular season was undeniable. In 2009-2010, they earned 121 standings points. Only the 2005-2006 Red Wings ever did better, with 124.

But here comes the 2015-16 Capitals, who are on pace for 128 standings points. They could become the most dominant regular-season team of the post-lockout era, which would be a tremendous feat, but it still wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans if they allow themselves to be dominated by a team like the Stars in the playoffs.

In this week’s snapshot, first of all, hi, it’s me, Peter, because Pat’s at the beach, but also, let’s talk about how the league’s most successful team might change over these final 30 games.

Forwards

Defense

Observations

• Rob Vollman pioneered a visualization for player usage and possession, provided above for Caps forwards by War On Ice. This tells me two important things, which deserve some rare sub-bullets:
  • The Capitals top two lines are working wonderfully. The top line is a rich blue color, denoting positive possession (and they’ve got an even better goal ratio). The second line, led by Justin Williams, is also terrific.
  • But the third line is a problem. Marcus Johansson, whose circle has grown pink over time and is now under 50 SA%, has been sacrificed to keep this line from burning the Caps too badly. This is not a great plan for the postseason, as Pat discussed earlier this week. I call this priority one for the trade deadline.
  • Also, the fourth line is fine, I guess, despite some bad luck, which I’ll discuss below.
• When Jason Chimera and Tom Wilson play together, the Caps take just 47.6 percent of the shot attempts. A with-or-without-you analysis suggests that Wilson, not 36-year-old Chimera, is the anchor: without Chimera, Wilson sees just 42.4 percent of shot attempts.
• One of my favorite stat curiosities is the list of forwards who have no goals but a ton of shots. Kings center Jordan Nolan leads this list with 45 shots and a 0.0 shooting percentage. If you change that list to forwards with one goal, your leader becomes Brooks Laich, who has one goal on 59 shots. Laich, the Erat of our age, has not scored since November 5. I wonder how that’s going over in the locker room and front office, and whether or not it’s justified. (It’s not.)
• Time to check in with TJ Oshie’s scoring pace versus that of a 30-goal scorer.

• Dammit.
• Alex Ovechkin is on pace for 53-54 goals and his fourth consecutive Richard trophy, which is so stupid I want to puke. Of course, that assumes Ovi will play every remaining game, which is not at all guaranteed for a team that may have nothing to play for in early April.
• Welcome to the snapshot, Mike Richards. Richards isn’t really making waves at 5v5, but he’s already eaten up a big chunk of penalty-killing time. If Richards can further lower the shorthanded workloads of top-six forwards like Nick Backstrom and TJ Oshie (the black and light blue lines below), that’s already important value added.

• I’ve re-added Brooks Orpik to the snapshot in expectation of his planned return to the lineup this week. It’s important to note that the list above is sorted by shot-attempt percentage, and that Orpik’s 14 pre-injury games contained a higher possession percentage than Alzner’s and Carlson’s complete seasons. Many people (i.e. me, Pat, you, the GOP presidential candidates) expected Carlson to blossom while Orpik was out. We were wrong. Carlson has been 47.2 percent without Orpik, compared to 50.1 percent with him. This could be attributed to a lot of stuff — the possibly heretofore unappreciated possession talent of Orpik (doubt it); the Caps’ systemic decline after those first 14 games; Carlson’s latent injuries; and, of course, dumb luck. I’m excited to see what Orpik can do when healthy; I’m also worried what might happen to Nate Schmidt and Dmitry Orlov‘s ice time. Because they’re studs and I love them.
• Finally, let’s do a blind comparison of three forwards.

• Check the comments for the reveal.

Glossary

• 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.
• rel SA%. The percentage more or less of the overall shot attempts the Caps see with the player on the ice as opposed to when the player is on the bench
• GF%. Goal percentage. The share of goals that the player’s team got while he was on the ice.
• 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%.

All numbers, unless otherwise cited or linked to, are from War on Ice.