Photo: Amanda Bowen

The weekly snapshot has been a very happy place so far. Overall, the Caps have been racking up points and doing so with underlying numbers that suggest their results are sustainable. Lately, however, some of the trends have been concerning. Braden Holtby has had to steal points for the team, which is the luxury of having an elite goalie. Over an 82-game season, an elite goalie will do that. But if the entire team fancies itself elite, they will need to rely on Holtby a lot less moving forward.

In the month of October, the Caps were the best shot suppression team in the league, allowing just 43.2 shot attempts against per 60 minutes of 5v5 play. Slowly but surely, since around Halloween, the team’s league-leading shot suppression abilities have deteriorated. From November forward the Caps are ranked 13th, allowing 51.1 shot attempts against per 60. Both numbers are adjusted for score, so score effects are not the issue here.

This has had a profound effect on the Caps’ overall possession. The graph below, from War on Ice, show the team’s 10-game rolling shot attempt percentage. In a hurry, this team has slid from elite to just pretty good.

Let’s do the numbers and see if we can figure anything out as to what is causing the Caps to look merely above average, and at times not even that good, in recent weeks.

Forwards

Defense

Observations

• To try to nail down the shot suppression issues, we’ll first take a look at the forwards. As a proxy for each line, I’ve picked the one forward who has spent essentially the entire season on each line. The graph shows the 10-game rolling average of 5v5 shot attempts against per 60 minutes.

• No forward line is immune to the Caps’ shot suppression woes. The first line has show some improvements but is still about 7 shot attempts/60 above where they were when the graph starts, 10 games into the season. The second line’s numbers have also gone up but are still okay-ish. The third line went from worse to worser, a further reminder that Jason Chimera and Jay Beagle need their minutes cut. The fourth line went from really good to horrible in a hurry, but have shown some signs of life recently.
• Next is the defense. This is also a 10-game rolling average of shot attempts against/60 of 5v5 play.

• Let’s first dispel the notion the the absence of Brooks Orpik is a driving cause to the Caps’ troubles. At the time of his injury, he was the worst defender at suppressing shots and, as you can see by looking at where the red line ends, the issues started before he went down with an injury.
• Every defender not named Dmitry Orlov has been severely impacted here. What’s interesting is that none of the remaining five defenders has really differentiated himself from any of the others in terms of suppressing shots. All of them are in a clump around 55 shot attempts against/60 over the last 10 games.
• The above lays out what is going wrong lately, but the million dollar question is why is this happening. Is this just a blip that we’ll look back on as no big deal a month from now? Is there something systemic going on? Has the Caps schedule gotten tougher? I’m much more inclined to believe the first or second than the third. Or maybe this team was overachieving for a while and regression has set in. Time will help sort this out, but I’m definitely interested in your thoughts on this, so let’s fire up the comment section on this chilly Sunday afternoon.
• Let’s bring it back to Orlov here for a second, as he’s really the only positive when looking at the shot suppression numbers. His 57.2 percent score-adjusted shot attempt percentage ranks 8th among the 197 defensemen who have skated at least 150 5v5 minutes so far this season. His plus-5.63 relative shot attempt percentage ranks 19th. Yet, he’s only seeing 13.06 minutes of 5v5 ice time per game, sixth among the Caps seven defenders and over three minutes behind the next closest defenseman, Nate Schmidt.
• Big thanks go out to Holtby, who has been the MVP of the team over the past few weeks. Bless you, Braden.

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%.

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