Photo: Amanda Bowen

The Washington Capitals had a good week. With three wins in four games, the third best possession in the league, and five goals from the world’s best scorer despite him missing a game to injury, it’s hard to argue otherwise.

Okay, maybe you could say that a week of games against Buffalo, Toronto, and Columbus isn’t exactly indicative of the broader NHL’s competition level. But with only 15 games left in the regular season, every shot, goal, and win counts that much more– even if it just means the team is more confident as they face down some much tougher teams next week.

In this week’s snapshot, we look back with curiosity and forward with optimism.

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

These are current as noon on Sunday, March 8. 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

• Okay, that’s better. The Capitals actually won some games this week and had the puck more overall. Puckon.net tells me that the team’s score-adjusted possession is back up to 52.0 percent, 11th best in the league. That’s good, though three of the four teams the Caps faced this week (Columbus, Toronto, Buffalo) are in the bottom five of the NHL. Those weekly fluctuations in strength of schedule are perhaps something I don’t address enough in the snapshot. The rest of these bullets are mostly about players having good numbers on the week, but if your perspective tells you the reason for the improvements isn’t that the Caps are good but rather that their opponents were bad, I could see your point.
• The Capitals’ next three opponents will be illuminating: NY Rangers (13th in 5v5 possession), Dallas (14th), and Boston (8th). The Caps could win all of those games, but it’ll be much harder than winning over Buffalo or Toronto.
• Brooks Laich cracked a goal-scoring slump of two months on Saturday night. That slump included 28 games– about one third of the season. Laich had about even possession in that time– 280 to 278 in on-ice shot attempts, so it’s not like he was bad. He wasn’t. He actually put 34 shots on goal during 5v5, the first and last of which were goals. Getting snakebit 32 times in a row happens sometimes; that’s the nature of the roughly 1-in-10 proposition that goal-scoring is. For comparison’s sake, Alex Semin famously fired 44 shots on goal in the seven-game Montreal series without hitting the back of the net once. When luck stops going in your favor, it’s important for a player to keep the rest of his game in tact. Laich did that. He was outscored just 9 to 8 during 5v5 in that span of time (or 8 to 7 between his two goals). That’s not bad for a third liner often going up against the league’s best scorers. Then again, if you think of Brooks Laich foremost as a $4.5-million asset, it’s more disquieting. Complexity.
• I wasn’t too excited about Curtis Glencross this time last week. He seemed to me be a few years removed from being an underrated moneyball-style player. I’m not eating crow just yet, but I’d be delighted to do so should he continue scoring like he has. He’s got four points in three games, scoring once on the power play and once at evens. You can see in the table above that Glencross has a PDO of 118.2 within our sample, but sampling bias has removed two 5v5 goals he surrendered to Columbus– the totality of CBJ’s even-strength scoring that night. That doesn’t really matter much, but it’s helpful to highlight how huge GlenX’s percentages are so far. With perfect goaltending in our sample, that means the Caps are shooting 18.2 percent. How much of that is random chance and how much is because Glencross is a net-crashing phenomenon on the order Mike Knuble remains to be decided. For now: I like him well enough.
• Now for the other new guy. Tim Gleason has only played with Mike Green for 43 minutes during 5v5 so far, but it’s worked out really well. Not well absolutely— they’re exactly at 50 percent possession (on ice for the same number of Caps shot attempts and opponent shot attempts) against three genuinely terrible possession teams– but certainly well compared to Jack Hillen, with whom Green did four percentage points worse (45.8 percent) during 5v5. By this time next week, with the Rangers, Stars, and Bruins in the rear view, we’ll know much better if Gleason is a true upgrade. I think he is, but a) I’m not sure, and b) compared to Hillen, it’s not saying much.
• Two guys who had terrific weeks are also two guys whom the numbers don’t typically love: Jay Beagle and Jason Chimera. Above you can see their possession (SA%) has jumped up significantly from last week. For Chimera that meant being above 55 percent in the last two games in addition to the two assists and 16 penalty minutes he racked up this week. For Beagle, that meant a strong game against Toronto and then a positively dominant game against the Sabres in which the Capitals outshot the Leafs 18 to 4 while Beagle was playing. (I wonder what these numbers imply for the construction of other teams’ forward depth.) Regardless, this was a big week for two bottom-six players, and let’s hope they can keep it up in the next seven days.
• Due to a minor lower-body injury, Alex Ovechkin missed one game and has parted from the company of the Capitals’ iron men. There are now eight remaining players on pace to play 82 games this season: forwards Ward, Brouwer, Johansson, and Backstrom; and defensemen Orpik, Carlson, Alzner, and Niskanen. One of my preseason predictions was that Carlson and Alzner wouldn’t hit 82. I’ve got 15 more chances to be proven wrong, and I’m knocking on wood that I will be .
• I just wanna take a moment to appreciate Alex Ovechkin. We don’t really do that enough. We’ve done way too much attributing Washington’s decline these last four years to Ovechkin when really it was the result of bad coaching and a diminished roster. For two years Ovechkin has contributed despite lacking help during 5v5. He’s now on pace to crack 50 goals for the 6th time in his career (and it would’ve been seven if 2013 weren’t shortened by the lockout). Ovi has improved his 5v5 goal scoring this season just barely, but he’s seen a dramatic increase in 5v5 points (up to 1.91 per 60 minutes from 1.55 last season). He’s actually shooting less during even strength this season, but he’s sharing the puck more– activating the players around more and better. Lots of people make a point about Ovechkin being better defensively this season, and I think that’s true but also slightly overblown. On the other hand, I think the dynamism he’s added to his offensive game is remarkable. He’s a playmaker and a passer, a skill set that will keep him productive a little longer once he hits the other side of 30 years old. Ovi rules.

• Hey, I wonder how many teams on which Andre Burakovsky would improve the top six. 15? 20? He’s in Hershey now.

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.