Did anyone see this coming? Did anyone watch the Caps around mid-February, when they were allowing their opponents more high-danger chances than any team in the last decade aside from the freaking Coyotes, and say, “welp, there’s a Stanley Cup contender right there. And not only that, but they’re going to make the Final based not on unreliable puck luck but rather a genuine turnaround in all fundamental statistics”?

No one did, and no one should have. To believe the Caps would improve would have been a shameless guess or an act of faith. But with a couple simple substitutions (Kempny for Bowey especially) without any detectable change in strategy besides hit everything that moves, the Caps are about to compete for the Cup, and they freaking deserve it. They outplayed and defeated Columbus, Pittsburgh, and Tampa – three excellent teams with multi-layered threats – to get here, and now all that stands between Alex Ovechkin and the Stanley Cup is George McPhee, Nate Schmidt, and Marc-Andre Fleury.

This is a surprise, maybe the single most enjoyable surprise of my life as a fan of this team. So here now is a surprise playoff snapshot, wherein we see what’s transformed the Washington Capitals into a finalist and what might yet go wrong against the Vegas Golden Knights.

Forwards

Defense

Notes

• By comparing their regular-season goal differential and their win-loss record, the 2017-18 Caps were the luckiest team in the league, winning 5.2 more games than we’d expect based on their Pythagorean win expectation (53 percent of games, rather than the 60 percent they actually won). Second and third in the league are two familiar teams: the Tampa Bay Lightning (60 percent expected, 66 percent won, or 4.8 lucky wins) and the Vegas Golden Knights (58 percent expected, 62 percent won, or 3.4 lucky wins). It’s been a weird playoffs, y’all.
• I touched on this a couple weeks ago, and I’ll go into more detail below, but the players who have stepped up in the postseason have been instrumental to the Caps’ success. Below is each player’s Game Score rate from the regular season and postseason. To me, Ovechkin, Kuznetsov, Orlov, and Niskanen are the big contributors among the skaters, with Oshie and Backstrom being two surprising disappointments (during 5-on-5 at least; they’re still contributing on the power play).

• What Dmitry Orlov and Matt Niskanen are doing is remarkable. Despite Carlson’s impressive point totals, it’s Orlov and Niskanen that are making the Washington blue line work. They’re relentless in getting the puck back in the defensive zone, shutting down zone entries, and restarting the attack. And they’re doing it all against the best opponents possible.

• About half of Orlov and Niskanen’s ice time has been against the best forwards on the opposing team (Panarin, Crosby, Stamkos by my reckoning). And despite those tough minutes, they’re winning the territory battle.

• Those graphs also suggest that Brooks Orpik is being hidden, seeing top opponents in just 15 percent of his 5-on-5 minutes. Orpik is below the 40-percent Mendoza line on those unfortunate shifts. (Djoos is even more sheltered at 9 percent, but the Caps owned half the shot attempts in that scant time.)

• Orpik is also being sheltered through his zone starts. Relative to the rest of the team, Orpik sees more of his shifts start in the offensive zone since the regular season than anyone except Michal Kempny. Djoos is similarly sheltered in this way, and we see another way in which Orlov and Niskanen’s assignments have been difficult.

• In his defense, and I mean this earnestly: Orpik was magnificent (overall, but also relative to expectations and in context of his usage) against Pittsburgh. Washington’s victory in that series was complete, not just carried on the backs of Ovechkin, Orlov, and Niskanen. I’d love to see a repeat in the final round.

• Here’s that same series data for forwards:

• Unlike Orpik, Jay Beagle’s usage is stable, which is probably not a good thing. He’s getting the same percentage of zone starts in the offensive zone (virtually none, i.e. a whopping 15 percentage points fewer than his teammates) and seeing roughly the same quality of competition (measuring by the average percentage of his opponents’ time-on-ice, 28). What’s different is two-fold. First, Beagle’s not being outscored: the Caps are even during his shifts. But other opponent event rates have increased by 10-20 percent with the sole but important exception of expected goals, stable at 2.5 per hour. We should be so lucky.
• I have no idea how, given his injury, but Nick Backstrom is playing pretty well. He’s technically been outscored (six to five) during 5-on-5 play, but I suspect that will end against Vegas. Backstrom is seeing one of the lowest on-ice shooting percentages among forwards (4.4, TJ Oshie has 4.2). That’s nearly halving the Backstrom line’s goal production, though I do worry a bit about his ability to get to the dangerous areas of the ice — the drop between his raw shot-attempt percentage (53.4) and his quality-weighted percentage (50.7 percent of expected goals) is the biggest on the team, and may keep him cold against Vegas.
• That’s a huge risk. The Backstrom line is supposed to be the two in Washington’s one-two punch, but it’s not working out quite that way. When Ovechkin is off the ice, Washington’s underlying percentages drop below 50 percent: 48 for shot attempts and 49 for expected goals. (Goals remain excellent at 54, but that may be unstable.) The Caps need the Backstrom line to keep the team dangerous when the top line is on the bench.
• On that topic, the scariest stat I have is this: When Alex Ovechkin and Dmitry Orlov are both off the ice, the Caps get out-attempted 419 to 349. That’s 45.4 percent.
• Backstrom is joined by one other forward with a negative goal differential: Devante Smith-Pelly. Both have a differential of minus-1, which speaks to Braden Holtby’s superb play but also the variance of outcomes independent of underlying process. Smith-Pelly has made some huge, huge plays in the postseason, but he’s also been buried in shot attempts (42.3 percent) and heavy shifts, despite having better usage than Beagle. My heart says that Smith-Pelly is a clutch playoff performer, but every other organ in me says he’s a replacement-level player.
• On the other end of the spectrum, Alex Ovechkin (54.2 percent of shot attempts, 61.6 percent of goals) and Evgeny Kuznetsov (53.9 and 63.2) deserve every bit of credit they’re getting. Just seeing Ovechkin near the top of the stack rankings is encouraging; it means the best scorer in hockey is having more opportunities to score. Individually, Ovechkin’s stats are stable – no big jumps in goal rate, point rate, shot-attempt rate, or expected goal rate. His shooting percentage has hopped up a bit (14.3 up from 12.4), but the real difference is Ovechkin’s play without the puck. First of all, there’s less of it – he’s got the puck almost always. But in those rare moments when he’s on defense, Ovechkin has been a wrecking ball. His rates of blocking shots (1.6 per hour, up from 1.0 in the regular season) and hitting players (12.5 per hour, up from 6.3) have spiked.
• On that topic, Vegas coach Gerard Gallant has gone strength-vs-strength in the playoffs, putting the William Karlsson line against the opponents’ stars about half the time.

• Putting those last two bullets together, I suspect that Ovechkin is about to hit Bill Karlsson and Jonathan Marchessault a whole lot. They are the Knights’ primary threat, and I think the Caps will have the answer to them. It’s gonna be a good final.

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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Headline photo: Chris Gordon