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Unless: Snapshot 8

By Peter Hassett

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March 11, 2018 1:15 pm

The Washington Capitals have 14 games remaining, but there aren’t many surprises waiting within them. By now we know who this team is. We know who will play and who will sit, who will be used where, who will drive play and who will be on his heels, who will celebrate and who will be blamed.

The Caps are a bottom-ten team in shot attempts and a bottom-five team in expected goals. They are top-ten on the power play and middle-of-the-pack on penalty kill. A goalie switch and some depth defensive improvements move the margins a bit, but it seems viciously obvious where this team’s ceiling is: the second round of the playoffs.

Unless. This week’s snapshot is about unless.

Forwards

Player GP TOI SA% Rel SA% GF% PDO
Vrana 61 743 51.5 +4.3 50.9 99.4
Burakovsky 42 497 51.5 +3.3 40.0 97.6
Backstrom 67 961 51.1 +4.5 56.5 102.1
Wilson 64 875 51.1 +4.0 53.1 101.8
Ovechkin 68 1011 50.6 +3.7 57.3 102.7
Oshie 62 840 50.1 +2.8 57.9 102.0
Eller 67 782 48.5 +0.5 46.9 100.1
Kuznetsov 68 972 47.5 -0.8 55.7 102.6
Connolly 59 614 46.8 -2.0 48.2 102.4
Stephenson 54 565 44.7 -4.0 58.3 103.3
Chiasson 53 498 44.0 -4.3 43.6 100.7
Smith-Pelly 63 703 43.9 -5.2 47.2 100.6
Beagle 68 658 39.5 -10.5 45.5 101.9

Defense

Player GP TOI SA% Rel SA% GF% PDO
Kempny 39 567 52.7 +1.1 59.1 102.3
Djoos 56 749 51.8 +4.9 56.7 102.1
Orlov 68 1303 50.0 +3.1 54.5 101.6
Jerabek 28 449 49.6 +0.9 44.8 99.2
Niskanen 54 1013 49.1 +1.4 57.7 103.3
Carlson 68 1200 49.1 +1.7 49.5 100.8
Bowey 51 675 45.3 -3.4 44.4 100.1
Orpik 68 1108 43.9 -6.3 41.0 99.6

Notes

  • Jay Beagle‘s on-ice shot-attempt percentage is south of 40. His relative shot-attempt percentage tells us that the Caps’ shot share drops 10 percentage points when he hits the ice. Those are atrocious numbers, and they beg for a deeper exploration of context, which is the whole point of this column, so let’s do that.
  • With more than half his shifts starting in the defensive zone, Beagle is the most defensively optimized forward – not just on the Caps, but in the entire NHL. We expect him to get outshot based on that deployment profile, and it’s my suspicion that those prior expectations have given Barry Trotz license to let this fiasco continue. Beagle, after all, wins 59.3 percent of his defensive-zone draws, 11th highest among centers according to the NHL’s unsecured, irradiated tire fire of a stat website, and that has helped the Capitals become the single best team in the league at winning D-zone draws, which is a lovely statistic that masks the outright disaster that  follows all those puck drops.
  • I need to highlight a shortcoming of the information I’ve got. A comprehensive analysis of Jay Beagle’s assignments should quantify what actually is happening after those defensive zone draws. We have good historical research about what happens after a win or loss in the defensive zone, but it’d be helpful to use that as a baseline to compare to Beagle this season. To do that, I’d need to scrape the NHL’s play-by-play data, then filter events while Beagle is on the ice in the moments after defensive-zone faceoff losses and wins. I’ve done that analysis before, but I don’t have the time for it this season, and I’m sorry.
  • On the opposite side of the spectrum, Andre Burakovsky is the Caps’ most offensively deployed forward (probably as a function of his having missed time to injury), so it’s kind of startling that he has the team’s worst goals-for percentage (14 for the Caps, 21 for opponents, or 40 percent goals-for). Burakovsky also has a team-low PDO (97.6), the sum of on-ice shooting and saving percentages, which might suggest that he’s falling victim to bad luck. That’s true, but it does not fully explain his goal-differential troubles, and I think it actually exposes a broader systemic problem with the team. Burakovsky’s most common linemates, Lars Eller and Brett Connolly, sport the highest rate of opponent high-danger chances per hour among Caps forwards. As a pair, Eller and Connolly struggle with puck possession when with Brooks Orpik, but they struggle even more at limiting opponent shot danger when with Matt Niskanen, who we’ll talk about more below.
  • I think that demonstrates how the Caps’ troubles on defense aren’t isolated to a couple players – and how formerly excellent possession players are struggling. This next point is an extension of that. Ahead of Eller and Connolly in expected opponent goal rate is Alex Ovechkin (2.9 per hour), though he (as always) compensates for his defensive risks with explosive offense – though maybe not enough. Ovi is now on pace for 48 goals. I’d score the Richard race as a three-way toss-up among him, Laine, and Malkin.
  • But I digress. The point remains that defensive struggles are not an individual problem. One good illustration of that fact is that John Carlson, who will earn a major raise this summer, has defensive numbers nearly identical to Brooks Orpik, whose NHL career is nearing an end. The numbers below are opponent event rates per hour during 5-on-5 play.
Player Attempts Unblocked On net Scoring chances High-danger chances Expected goals Goals
Carlson 62.5 48.1 33.2 32.5 13.3 2.6 2.7
Orpik 65.7 50.3 35.5 34.0 13.9 2.7 2.5
  • Now, like Ovechkin, Carlson mitigates his bad defensive numbers with a lot of offense – 17 percent more shot attempts than Orpik, but I have a hard time telling the difference between their results when in their own zone.

  • If the last few bullets feel like me walking back the notion of a tidy fix to the Capitals’ defensive issues through scratching Brooks Orpik: the Capitals should scratch Brooks Orpik. His 43.9 percent of shot attempts is brutal, and although he’s subject to the same systemic problems that plague the rest of the team, it’s an inescapable conclusion that Orpik is not suited for his workload (20 minutes a night) at this point in the season and at this point in his career. Both the Kempny and Jerabek additions (included in the snapshot above with their full-season data) suggest that management is aware of the Orpik problem, but there should be exactly zero confidence among Caps fans that any change is coming. Orpik is virtually unscratchable, and the precedent of last season’s acquisition of Kevin Shattenkirk pushing Nate Schmidt out of the lineup instead of Karl Alzner (then nursing but playing through an injury) or Orpik (who was dependent on Schmidt for his sterling numbers) betrays a sober truth: Barry Trotz is too stubborn to make adjustments here. Not to dredge up bad old memories, and although the margin on the series was razor thin, I wonder what would have happened if Trotz had opted to keep Alzner (or Orpik) out of the lineup instead of playing seven defensemen for the first time in his administration against the Penguins in games six and seven.
  • Wow, that was long bullet.
  • Matt Niskanen‘s down season has gone unexplored. Although he’s still doing very well in on-ice goals (57.7%), Niskanen has seen a huge reversion in process. For the first time in Washington, Niskanen is below 50 percent in shot attempts (49.1%) and expected goals (46.8%).
  • Which I think shows us further how the Caps’ diminishment is system-wide and not specific to a couple problem players. This is not what I believed twenty games into the season, but I have become convinced over time. There’s no quick fix to what ails the Caps – at least not on a player level. But when you’ve got this much systemic badness and this many self-sabotaging decisions, you should fire your coach. The Caps should do it. Now.

Glossary

  • GP. Games played.
  • TOI. Time on ice. The amount of time that player played during 5v5.
  • 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 difference of shot attempts the Caps had when the player on the ice as opposed to when the player is on the bench.
  • GF%. Goals-for percentage. The share of goals that the player’s team got while he was on the ice.
  • PDO. (A meaningless acronym.) The sum of the player’s on-ice shooting percentage and his goalies’ on-ice save percentage. Above 100 means the player is getting fortunate results that may be reflected in goal%.

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