Caps lose at home to the Dallas Stars for the umpteenth time: numbers for the morning after

March 7, 2017 8:25 am

After a franchise-record 15-straight home game wins, the Capitals dropped Monday night’s decision 4-2 to the Dallas Stars, ending the streak. The Stars always seem to have the Caps’ number, and they’ve been on a streak of their own, beating the Caps in Washington in every matchup since 2006. Holtby has never beaten the Stars. That said, the Caps made quite a comeback push with 29 shot attempts in the third period (all situations) to just eight by the Stars.

The Caps ended up with 58 shot attempts to the Stars’ 40 at five-on-five. Even after the rare loss they still lead the division by seven points. Despite the at-times frustrating playoff matchup structure, they will want to keep that lead as it will likely award them a weaker first round opponent than if they were to sit in the two or three spot.

Key Stats

The Caps took a lot of shots this game. At 58 five-on-five shot attempts, it was tied for the most in any game this season with the 4-1 win over the Rangers in late February. In all situations, it was the second most at 82 behind the 87 they took in a 3-0 loss to the Islanders. This game was also tied for most shots on goal taken by the Caps, at 44. And this was the most shots the Caps have put on-net on the powerplay in any game this season, at 14 (and somehow they didn’t score).
The recently reunited top line of Alex Ovechkin, Nick Backstrom, TJ Oshie was mega-dominant. Yes, the forechecking pressure of the Stars resulted in an awkward sequence and a net-front turnover by Backstrom leading to a goal against. But besides that… the top line was plus-15 in shot attempts and produced two very pretty goals, including a work-of-art redirect by Backstrom and an epic backhand by Oshie. Ovechkin had an incredible 14 total shot attempts and looked threatening on many shifts.
The fourth line was back to being the fourth line… at least in terms of ice time. In our weekly snapshot, we talked about optimizing the Caps’ lines and the coaching staff must have read that because the fourth line only played about six minutes last night at five-on-five. That said, they spent much of that time against the Jamie Benn and Tyler Seguin line, implying that they are still being used in the shutdown role we lamented. But there’s more… The Benn and Seguin line only played 8.5 minutes at five-on-five, fewest of any Stars line, while the Cody Eakin line led the way with almost 12 minutes.

Unsung Hero of the Game

The new guy gets it this time: Kevin Shattenkirk. He was paired with Brooks Orpik, and while we’ve often referred to Nate Schmidt as an “Orpik Whisperer” maybe Shattenkirk has the gift as well. They ended the night plus-eight in shot attempts at five-on-five, best of any Caps pairing. While the Caps outshot the Stars fairly handily, it wasn’t a great night in the scoring chance department with the final tally 23-17 in favor of the Stars at five-on-five. But the Shattenkirk-Orpik pairing came out as the only pair above water in that statistic, and Shattenkirk continues to pass the eye-test with his crisp passing plays.

Trend to Watch

Over the last 25 games, the Caps have scored about 10.5 goals per 60 minutes spent on the powerplay, the most of any such stretch this season. That said, on the broader scale the Caps are actually close to minimum with regards to shot attempt and scoring chance generation on the PP in the Barry Trotz era. Despite a recent uptick, this has indeed been a down year for the Caps on the PP. We all know that PP opportunities cannot be relied upon in the playoffs, and powerplay effectiveness can vanish in a puff of smoke, but this is still a rare area where the Caps have been slightly weaker during this generally successful season.