Visualizing possession for the best Caps team we’ve ever seen

February 16, 2017 8:19 am

Time to check in on one of my favorite data visualizations. Concocted by Tyler Dellow a few years back, this is a colorful way to look at how ice time and shot attempts are distributed.

I’ve performed this exercise a few times, most recently October 2015. This season paints a stark picture that you can’t miss.

A word on process:

Defensemen appear along the top, ordered by time-on-ice percentage.
Forwards along the left in the same order.
Where each forward and defensemen meet, that’s the Caps’ 5v5 on-ice shot-attempt percentage when those players are together. (This percentage is not adjusted.)
The cells are color-coded. Green is better, red is worse.

Shot Attempt Percentage

	Orlov	Niskanen	Carlson	Alzner	Orpik	Schmidt
Ovechkin	50.5	50.3	46.1	43.8	50.4	52.2
Johansson	54.0	57.3	48.3	50.8	50.8	53.6
Kuznetsov	54.5	55.9	50.1	46.9	48.1	48.5
Backstrom	49.8	50.3	46.8	47.5	54.0	54.1
Oshie	53.5	51.7	49.5	45.5	53.6	54.7
Williams	57.4	58.2	50.7	51.1	50.8	51.9
Burakovsky	52.8	57.6	51.7	51.0	56.5	59.8
Eller	57.5	56.7	55.0	49.5	58.6	62.1
Connolly	54.2	54.9	52.8	49.4	62.7	61.3
Wilson	51.9	52.3	47.6	43.2	49.2	49.4
Beagle	47.0	46.8	44.1	40.1	44.6	48.6
Winnik	52.0	51.3	49.6	44.9	47.1	48.3

This year I’ve also added a second visualization, using the same color coding as the first table, but showing the percentage that defenseman plays with each forward. This allows us to see if the Caps are getting the most from their best deployments, or if they’re overusing weaker ones.

Time on Ice (% of Defenseman’s)

	Orlov	Niskanen	Carlson	Alzner	Orpik	Schmidt
Ovechkin	0.31	0.28	0.33	0.31	0.24	0.24
Johansson	0.29	0.33	0.28	0.31	0.24	0.25
Kuznetsov	0.34	0.29	0.30	0.24	0.26	0.28
Backstrom	0.27	0.32	0.32	0.36	0.21	0.19
Oshie	0.24	0.23	0.28	0.27	0.18	0.17
Williams	0.27	0.27	0.24	0.23	0.27	0.28
Burakovsky	0.24	0.23	0.22	0.20	0.24	0.24
Eller	0.21	0.21	0.19	0.19	0.31	0.32
Connolly	0.16	0.15	0.13	0.13	0.20	0.22
Wilson	0.20	0.21	0.20	0.23	0.23	0.22
Beagle	0.20	0.21	0.20	0.23	0.22	0.20
Winnik	0.16	0.15	0.16	0.17	0.20	0.19

Observations

Before we get into specifics, I’d recommend you blur your eyes a bit and just linger on it for a while. Ideally we’d want our green at top left and our red at bottom right.
And that’s what we get for the most part. The Capitals are a good team, and this vis shows it. There’s big happy globs of dark green along the top and left, and the deepest reds are towards the bottom-right. But now let’s go deeper.
Karl Alzner and Lars Eller might have caught your eye — for opposite reasons. They mostly stick to one color (red for Karl, green for Lars). Karl’s trouble expands a bit on my with-or-without-you discussion about Alzner from Wednesday. Forwards uniformly put up their worst numbers when they skate with Alzner; Defensemen are often at their best when skating with Eller.
One big surprise, unless you’ve been hearing Pat rag on it every day for the last couple weeks, is Dmitry Orlov‘s spot at far left (982 minutes). Orlov now gets more 5-on-5 time than any other defenseman, and he’s mostly wrecking house. I’ll expand on this next week, but Orlov’s defensive performance has blossomed since the new year. He’s an excellent fit as the Caps’ big D at evens: solid possession, opening up powerplay time for Carlson and PK time for Alzner.
Speaking of Karl again, I’m thoroughly unsurprised that role players like Justin Williams and Andre Burakovsky temper Alzner’s problems. The Caps’ forward depth this season is remarkable; without it (and without Ovechkin scoring a ton), they’d be in some trouble.
Where Brooks Orpik and Nate Schmidt collide with Lars Eller’s third line, the Caps dominate (58.6 and 62.1 of shot attempts respectively). And that makes up a good 30 percent of Schmidt/Orpik’s ice time, which might make them look better than they are. I’m desperately curious what would happen if that pairing got 4-5 percent more ice time with the top six (and Alzner/Carlson getting more with the Eller line). The stretch run could be a great time for experimentation and tune-ups for the Caps.
Finally, don’t sleep on Marcus Johansson and Matt Niskanen. They spend a lot of ice time together (304 minutes so far) and basically live in the offensive zone (57.3 of shot attempts). Neither of these players garners a lot of attention — somehow each even less than Nick Backstrom — but they’re quietly giving Barry Trotz a deadly deployment.

Finally, I’ve also added a third visualization which is just which Twin Peaks character each combo is. I think that one speaks for itself. No explanation is necessary.