Hello. I’m Peter. This is the snapshot column. Since 2013, this is the place where we check in on how Washington Capitals skaters are playing by using numbers, except we try very hard not to be boring in the process. The numbers are just the starting point, and from them we find interesting stuff and then maybe go a level or two deeper by asking why or how the numbers came about. Sometimes that gives us suggestions on how the Caps could play better, or maybe explanations for why they’re doing poorly, or just highlight some stuff for us to watch for in future games. In any result, it’s an exercise for exploring what we know and what we don’t about hockey.

The Capitals are 27 games into the season, and I’ve deliberately waited until now to begin this column. For a bunch of reasons, I had not put much faith into the data until now. In addition to the usual small-sample-size skittishness, I was irked by the absence of the Washington core due to COVID protocol, and a little concerned about how trustworthy early returns could be when the Caps were facing the same three teams every other night for three weeks. To me, January and a bit of February were just exhibition hockey, but now that the team is mostly healthy and they’ve got a lot of games under their belt, I’m finally ready to talk about it.

In this week’s snapshot, I’m finally ready to talk about how Peter Laviolette has fixed* Evgeny Kuznetsov.

Note*: Yeah right. Nope.

Forwards

Defenders

Glossary

• GP – Games played.
• TOI – Time on ice in minutes
• SA% – Shot-attempt percentage. The share of total shots attempted by Washington while the skater is on the ice. 50% means even.
• SA% Rel – Relative shot-attempt percentage. The difference in SA% when the player is on the bench versus on the ice. 0% means even.
• GF% – Goals-for percentage. The share of total goals scored by Washington when the skater is on the ice. 50% means even.
• PDO – The sum of Washington’s shooting percentage and saving percentage when the skater is on the ice. 1 means even. The acronym doesn’t stand for anything, and yes, that it is annoying.

Notes

• At a team level, the Capitals are responsible for virtually half (49.9 percent) of the shot attempts in their games. That ranks them, as you’d expect, right in the middle of the NHL, but “of the NHL” is a super meaningful phrase this season. With four isolated divisions, we really care just about the East right now. There, the Caps control more shot attempts than the Sabres, Rangers, and Flyers, but trail behind everyone else. When you weigh those shot attempts by how likely each attempt is to become a goal, you get an expected goals model, and by that number the Caps are — wait for  — way better. That’s a reversal from recent years. By Natural Stat Trick’s reckoning of xG, the Caps are 50.9 percent, behind just the New York Islanders, with whom the Caps will be sparring for first in the division.
• To me, the weird part of the gap between shot attempts versus expected goals (or quantity versus quantity and quality) is on the defensive side of the puck. The Caps continue to get better defensively, and we’ll explore how a few times below — plus some important exceptions.
• Before we get into individuals, I want to call out a strange grouping among the forwards. The team’s top line and bottom line are below 50 percent in shot-attempts, meaning opponents take more shots than they do, but the middle six is all well above 50 percent. That’s a curious distribution, but I think there are apparent answers. So let’s get strange.
• Evgeny Kuznetsov (55.4 of shot attempts owned by the Caps) is playing some of the best hockey of his career…

• …is maybe something you could say. I wouldn’t recommend it though. In September, I said this:

For Peter Laviolette, Kuznetsov is problem A1. He either needs his game rebuilt from the ground-up, or he needs someone else to take responsibility for the 160 feet where he’s terrible. To continue to pretend like he’s a top-line center can no longer be an individual failing; it’s now an organizational one.

• But Laviolette has not rebuilt Kuznetsov’s game, nor has he given him more line support. Instead, Laviolette’s solution to the Kuzy problem is shelter the living hell out of him. Kuznetsov is now the most offensively deployed player in the NHL (89.5 percent of his non-neutral starts are in the offensive zone, about twenty per hour). Despite that cushy context, one of every four opponent shot attempts comes from a high-danger area. For comparison, for Backstrom it’s one of every nine. And all those sacrificed offensive-zone starts come a cost. I’ve circled that cost in the graph below.

• It’s Nic Dowd, who at a glance might seems like the weakest forward on the team with that 45.2 shot-attempt percentage (SA%). The Caps do six percentage points better in attempts when Dowd is on the bench, but that’s not a reflection of his play so much as it’s a reflection of his usage. Four times out of five, he’s being used defensively. Dowd had a role like that with the Canucks before he came to the Caps, and now Laviolette has returned him to it. This is too much to ask of his skill set, of which I am a big believer. But when we see Dowd and his linemate Hathaway racking up 20 and 21 penalty minutes respectively, that’s further evidence that they’re being asked to chase the puck too much.

• At the other end of the spectrum is Richard Panik, who is killing the possession game with a team-high 55.8% shot-attempt percentage (SA%) has had an elite shot suppression performance this season. Opponents take the fewest shot attempts during his shifts. Now, using normie plus-minus, Panik is a minus-6, and his on-ice goals percentage (GF%) is a team-low 39.9, but that’s not telling us much. The Caps have the puck most when Panik is on the ice, and he increases the team’s share of shot attempts most when he hops over the boards (7.7 SA% rel). Yeah, he has virtually no scoring talent, but Richard Panik is somehow the middle six’s secret weapon. Like a blunted weapon. He’s a foam sword basically. Below, from Hockey Viz, is a heatmap of opponent shots when Panik’s on the ice. The big blue blob in front of Washington’s net indicate that opponents get way fewer attempts from that location compared to league average. Micah’s model says opponents lose about a quarter of their ability to score when they face Panik.

• One more quick glance at normie plus-minus. Minus-nine is where they have Alex Ovechkin, which tells us almost nothing considering he’s been on-ice for three shorthanded opponent goals. Still, it’s not good to see Ovechkin under 50 percent in goals-for during five-on-five play (48.3 GF%), especially considering it’s not too far off from underlying numbers like shot-attempt percentage or expected-goals percentage (both 47.1%). Ovechkin seems to me to be having worse-than-usual defensive problems this season —  opponents have the highest rate of high-danger chances when he’s on the ice — but I’m not worried as much about his offense. With ten goals in 23 games, he is way outside the Rocket Richard race, but as long as he’s shooting, I’m feeling good about his play. And he’s still shooting, generating about twenty shot attempts per hour, on par with his last few seasons. As long as he’s getting power-play looks as well, Ovechkin will begin to close in on those goal leaders a bit.

• Jakub Vrana needs more ice time. That is all.
• In my process for going through the numbers, I like to color-code the data using league-wide numbers. When I look at the opponent chances stats for Caps players, they’re mostly well into the green (Ovechkin is the lone exception). That is a trend from the past three seasons which has continued under Laviolette’s regime. Laviolette didn’t start this trend, but he is stewarding it well.
• Now to the blue line, where I’m happy with Justin Schultz and Dmitry Orlov, but I’m blown away by how stingy Nick Jensen has been. His shot-suppression numbers are excellent this season, with opponents seeing just 6.6 high-danger chances per hour (the rest of the team allows closer to nine). What Panik is doing among forwards, Jensen is doing an even better job of it among defenders. From HockeyViz, blue blob good, you know the drill:

• If you take the league’s 189 defensive pairs with at least 60 minutes and then rank them by the opponent’s shot rate, Orlov-Jensen would be 16th best. They represent the Laviolette/Capitals’ identity these days: stifling defense with some exceptions that are either exciting or excruciating.
• Meanwhile, Brenden Dillon (48.3 SA%) appears to be a passenger, Of the top-ten Washington defensive pairings by ice time, when you rank them by shot-attempt percentage, Dillon’s in last (with TVR), 8th (with Carlson), and 7th (with Schultz). If anyone deserves a night off, it’s not 43-year-old Zdeno Chara; it’s Dillon. I am a bit lost as to what he brings to the table right now. Especially when you consider who’s waiting in the wings.

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Headline photo: Cara Bahniuk