And the Beat Goes On: Week 6 Snapshot

November 29, 2015 12:47 pm

Photo by Amanda Bowen

Twenty-three games into the season, the Caps sit atop the Metropolitan Division (worst division name in sports? yes!) with a record of 17-5-1. This team is good.

Caps take over first in the Metro Division with 4-2 win over Leafs. Also second in the Eastern Conference and third in the NHL. Not bad.

— Katie Brown (@katiebhockey) November 29, 2015

This team is very good. In fact, they have us thinking they may even be The Team. The Caps puck possession has slipped a tad in recent weeks, down to a still pristine 53.2 score-adjusted shot attempt percentage, good for fifth in the NHL. Over the past two weeks, this mark has been 50.2 percent. Still fine enough and nothing to be concerned about yet, though certainly worth being aware of.

In other words, the beat goes on. This is a great team we are watching. Let’s do the numbers thing.

Forwards

Player	GP	TOI	SA%	rel SA%	GF%	PDO
Backstrom	20	299.70	60.28	9.17	66.67	101.90
Williams	23	288.67	57.26	5.48	60	100.77
Ovechkin	22	340.9	56.82	4.87	64.52	102.55
Oshie	23	321.20	54.65	1.99	62.5	101.54
Johansson	23	320.78	53.33	0.12	69.87	104.32
Laich	23	202.41	53.31	0.08	27.27	94.13
Burakovsky	21	242.92	52.04	-2.19	47.06	99.76
Latta	14	118.08	51.61	0.49	44.44	98.12
Kuznetsov	23	320.96	51.13	-2.99	64.29	103.51
Chimera	23	258.62	49.23	-5.21	42.11	98.03
Beagle	23	280.64	48.96	-5.70	50	100.64
Wilson	23	250.91	46.74	-8.30	50	100.87

Defense

Player	GP	TOI	SA%	rel SA%	GF%	PDO
Orlov	23	307.13	57.5	5.75	65.22	104
Chorney	14	173.07	54.07	0.47	69.23	106.90
Schmidt	18	293.11	53.99	3.15	57.14	101.72
Niskanen	23	421.1	53.67	0.69	57.14	100.77
Alzner	23	402.66	52.92	0.50	61.54	101.99
Carlson	23	412.37	50.5	-4.42	50	99
Orpik	14	231.94	50.18	-6.65	43.48	95.85

Observations

Remember last season when shot generation was a problem for the forward group? Alex Ovechkin was first in the league in shot attempts/60 and the Caps didn’t have another forward in the top 120. There is still room for improvement, as the closest forward to Ovechkin (who again leads) is Justin Williams at 78th. But the team has four players in the top 120 and this group is clearly improved.

Ovechkin skews the differences a bit, but one positive here is that each line has a player in the top five.
Marcus Johansson‘s leap in 5v5 goal scoring last season was partially driven by shooting the puck a lot more. This season, his shot attempts/60 (9.94) are above his marks in years before the Trotz era, but below his 11.9 shot attempts/60 of last season. While players like Evgeny Kuznetsov and Nick Backstrom prove you can be a key offensive player without shooting the puck a ton, I’m sure the Caps would love to see Johansson firing at his rate from last season. Although, it shouldn’t be overlooked that he’s second among the team’s forwards in assists/60 and primary assists/60, trailing only Kuznetsov in both categories.
TJ Oshie has never had an individual points percentage below 66.7 percent over the course of a season. He currently sits at 46.7 percent so far this season, so perhaps he’ll start showing up on the scoring sheet at 5v5 more often as the season moves along. Oh, and he’s currently on pace for 21 goals, which is less than 30.
Big ups to Jason Chimera, who has been showing up on the score sheet at a dizzying rate over the past two weeks. His speed down the wing on power play zone entries has revitalized the second unit.
The Caps bottom-six is still in need of an upgrade and/or adjustment to deployments. We’ve talked plenty about the third line at 5v5, but the fourth line has been positively awful the past two weeks. According to Puckalytics, Brooks Laich, Tom Wilson, and Michael Latta have skated 55:01 together since November 15th and the Caps have seen just 43.7 percent of the shot attempts over that span. The team, without adjusting for score, is at a dead even 50 percent over that span.
John Carlson has been without Brooks Orpik for a good bit of time now and the numbers are a little surprising.

The samples are still small enough that I’d hesitate jumping to any grand conclusions. After all, so far this season Carlson has a 49.2 percent shot attempt percentage away from Orpik in 206 minutes, but last season he had a 59.1 shot attempts percentage away from Orpik in 215 minutes. So, there could be any number of things going on here, much of which could just be noise. But, I think any guarded hypothesis one might form should center more on Carlson than on Orpik or Schmidt.
Speaking of Schmidt, he is tied for second among all NHL defensemen with a plus-4 penalty differential. Given the job a defender is asked to do, I think any sort of positive penalty differential is remarkable. He’s also second in penalty differential/60, drawing 0.82 penalties per 60 minutes of play. The guy he’s second to in both categories? Arizona’s Oliver Ekman Larsson, who is easily a top 10 defenseman in the league.
The surprisingly adequate Takoda (?) Chorney keeps on chugging along. The Caps could still stand to upgrade their defensive depth. Oooo Boy, it’d get scary in a hurry if more than one of the seven defensemen were out injured at the same time.

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
Goal%. 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%.