Home / Analysis / The Capitals tried to score on themselves multiple times in this game and actually succeeded once: numbers for the morning after

The Capitals tried to score on themselves multiple times in this game and actually succeeded once: numbers for the morning after

By Chris Cerullo

 1 Comment

January 9, 2022 7:59 am

The Washington Capitals should have beaten the Minnesota Wild on Saturday night. They didn’t, but they should have. The Caps dropped the 3-2 decision in a shootout.

Scoring in your own net is bad.

  • As I said in the intro, I thought the Caps should have won this game. They outplayed the Wild at five-on-five and got the lion share of the power plays and yet could not avoid the very obvious self-inflicted errors. The Wild only recorded 22 shots but it was one taken by a Caps player that helped them the most. You know of which shot I speak so I’m not going to bring that up again.
  • Zach Fucale has been tremendous in a Caps uniform. He is now the NHL record holder when it comes to a shutout streak to start an NHL career. It’s obviously a very small sample size but Fucale has stopped four goals above expected this season in the NHL. Ilya Samsonov has let in 4.4 more goals than expected and Vitek Vanecek similarly has let in 2.8 more than expected.
  • I thought Evgeny Kuznetsov‘s line was unlucky to not get on the scoresheet at five-on-five. They had the highest expected goals percentage (70.5-percent) of any of the Caps lines.

  • I have to admit with NaturalStatTrick down for almost the entirety of this game and postgame it has made it hard for me to come up with a whole lot for you in this post. I can tell you that MoneyPuck says the Caps would expect to win this game if replayed 66.3-percent of the time.
  • Alex Ovechkin got a point on Kuznetsov’s power play goal. That’s cool. The power play still sucks major butt though. 1-for-5 in a shootout loss. Woo.
  • Connor McMichael has reached the ten-point mark this season with his goal in this game. He played over 11 minutes total which is basically two games worth of ice time for him recently so that’s great to see.

Numbers thanks to Hockey-reference.com and NaturalStatTrick.com.

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