Photo: Rob Carr

For a good part of the early season, the Caps were playing like they had discovered the goal cheat in NHL ’94, imported Bo Jackson’s dominance from Tecmo Bowl, and mastered the Madden truck stick. They were dominant. While the team has continued to rack up the points and now sits one point out of the lead in the Eastern Conference with three games in hand, the dominance isn’t there anymore. The process has had some troubling signs of late.

In week 2, we talked about the long road that is an NHL season. The long road has hit some bumps lately, but is it time to be concerned? Are these bumps just an inevitable part of the process of an 82-game season, or are the Caps coming back down to earth a bit and won’t return to their dominant ways? Let’s run the numbers and dig into all of this.

Forwards

Defense

Observations

• The Caps score-adjusted shot attempt percentage stands at 52.1 percent, which ranks eighth in the league. Both of these are season lows. The good news is 52.1 percent is a very respectable possession number and, when you pair it with one of the best goalies in the league, it’s still a championship-level hockey team. The bad news is that the 52.1 percent has been achieved by some really uneven results, the latest of which have been concerning.
• The Caps slide in possession began around November 1. Since then, the team has been ranked 13th in possession, just above water at 50.4 percent. The rolling 10-game graph tells the story well.

• While this is concerning, dips like this can happen over the course of a long season. If the Caps right the ship soon and go back to their world-beating possession ways, we’ll look back on this as just leg of the marathon.
• Here is a graph with ten-game rolling shot-attempt percentage of the 4 teams to reach the conference finals last season. This is not exhaustive or scientific enough to tell us anything for certain, but it can be a part of the puzzle in trying to figure out where our worry meter should be on the Caps

• All four team hit some pretty deep valleys. Chicago was the only team never to dip under 50 percent, but their possession line isn’t totally consistent. The other three teams had some big peaks and valleys over the course of a season as well. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t sweat the Caps’ recent trends, but it does show that a full-on panic at this point would be silly.
• Thank goodness for Braden Holtby. As I noted above, every team goes through bad spells. To have a top-five goalie to help keep the train on the tracks is one thing that makes the Caps such a scary team. Outplaying this Caps team over a seven-game series would be a tall order. An even taller order would be outplaying the Caps and having your netminder outplay Holtby. Good luck to you.
• Over the past 30 days, 26 goalies have played at least 360 minutes (six full games). Holtby’s 95.62 5v5 save percentage ranks first.
• Stan Galiev has played only six games, so he’s not in the chart yet, but he’s been solid. He has a 54.21-percent shot-attempt percentage and a plus-5.40 relative. Perhaps it’s time for him to get some more regular playing time. We know who the usual suspects are to be scratched in favor of him, but one can dream a dream in which Jay Beagle or Jason Chimera sits for a game or two.
• All but two of the Caps defensemen are negative relative possession players, but all of them are above 50 percent. This just goes to show that Dmitry Orlov and Nate Schmidt are *enter flexing emoji here*.
• Evgeny Kuznetsov has dropped below 50-percent possession. Don’t get me wrong, he’s awesome and dynamic, but the second line has had some bumps lately in the possession game. Perhaps the Caps should shake up the top six again.
• I would love to see the fourth line from Saturday’s game against Tampa stay together. In fact, let’s keep the line together and call it the third line. And then give them third line minutes. Please and thank you.
• I didn’t get to watch the game live last night, but thanks for making it so fun to check in periodically on Twitter.

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