In their daily feature, our bitter enemies at Japers Rink revealed Thursday’s noon number was zero, as in that’s how many shots on goal the Capitals generated in six minutes of power-play time in their loss to Edmonton on Wednesday night. Once the “gold standard” power play in the NHL, Washington’s is now one of the league’s worst.

Fixing the power play needs to be Washington’s priority down the stretch.

The man advantage has undergone several painful dry spells this season. Compounded by their penchant for giving up shorthanded goals (six, only two teams have allowed more), the Caps power play has cost the team wins and standings points.

And it’s landed Washington among the league’s worst in power-play conversion stats. Whether you include shorthanded goals or not, the Caps power play ranks in the league’s bottom five.

The teams below the Caps are very bad teams — historically bad in some cases — so this is not good company to be in. Instead, let’s compare them with a likely first-round playoffs opponent, which HockeyViz thinks is the Carolina Hurricanes right now.

Carolina don’t have an elite power-play, but they’re still very good. They have slumps, which you can see above, but they deliver more goals on fewer opportunities than the Caps, with like half as many shorthanded goals allowed.

Let’s go deeper. Here’s HockeyViz power-play heatmaps for three teams: Philadelphia (who have a profoundly bad power play), Carolina (right around tenth in the league), and Washington.

A team that by all accounts is ass-tier on the power play, Philadelphia, generates 19 percentage points fewer expected goals than league average. Washington’s likely opponent generates four percentage points more expected goals than league average. And Washington looks way more like the former than the latter with 11 percentage points under league average. Looking closer at Washington’s heatmap (where brown means more shots relative to league average and purple means fewer), we can see a big brown blob in the Ovi Spot (trademark, patent pending, all rights reserved). Carolina certainly lacks danger from that location, but they more than make up for it with shots from up close. Washington, meanwhile, lacks a discernible secondary threat.

(A quick aside to say that expected goals models don’t have information about the passes that precede shots, so consequently they do not properly “appreciate” the “danger” of a good Ovechkin shot from the left faceoff dot. Not a big deal for what we’re discussing today, but always good to note.)

The power play’s Ovicentricity has become its fatal flaw.

And it’s not hard to see how they got into this position. Alex Ovechkin, who has been on-ice for 221 of Washington’s 236 power-play minutes, is both the team’s and solar system’s best goal scorer. Meanwhile, COVID and injuries have wreaked havoc on the positions of the power play, especially the half-wall and low-man spots. Whatever the reason, the place where the team has arrived is not a good place. They are simultaneously relying too much on Ovechkin and also not effectively activating him.

And yet, Ovechkin’s still getting his looks. His individual attempt rates have actually increased over the past three seasons.

This suggests that the power play’s overall decline is due to one or a combination of the below:

• a failure to supply Ovechkin with chances of sufficient quality/danger,
• a decline in Ovechkin’s ability to score that is somehow only in effect during the power play, or
• everything that isn’t Ovi.

Speaking to that last item, here are HockeyViz heatmaps for the last five years of the Washington power play when Ovechkin’s on the ice, except I have subtly redacted the Ovi Spot. This is, roughly, a visualization of everything that isn’t Ovechkin. Again: brown blobs mean the Caps shoot more from that spot compared to league average, and purple means they shoot less.

Throughout the last five years, the Caps rarely see shots generated from the Nicklas Backstrom position (the half wall at right side, opposite Ovechkin). Instead, the big changes in the past three seasons are the diminishing chances from the high slot (typically John Carlson) and from the near-right side of the net. That spot has seen a lot of different personnel lately (and that roster churn is Blaine Forsythe’s best case to deflect criticism), but Evgeny Kuznetsov and Anthony Mantha were its most common occupants last season. Also down is the bumper spot, where TJ Oshie‘s quick release delivered 13 goals in 53 games last season.

Without the bumper, without the low man, without the high slot, Washington’s power play has become more one-dimensional than it has ever been. It’s the Ovi Spot and nothing else. It makes life easy for opponent penalty killers (look at the increase in Ovechkin’s blocked shots in the graph above), and it frustrates Ovechkin, which offends me on a spiritual level.

Everything I’ve discussed so far is just one facet of the power play, and perhaps it’s not the most important facet. What the Capitals do when they’re in the offensive zone matters, but what might matter even more is how they get into the offensive zone in the first place. Back in 2016, Arik Parnass (now director of analytics for the Colorado Avalanche) called the Capitals the “gold standard” power play. The reason why was the team’s ability to quickly and cleanly gain the offensive zone and then fall into their reliable, multi-threat formation. Arik compiled this video of Washington’s successful zone-entry tactics.

Disgraced hockey writer Patrick Holden, who know writes a newsletter called Pokechecked by Murphy, called Marcus Johannson’s role in Washington’s 2015 neutral-zone work “plan A for power plays.” Both Holden and Parnass identified how Washington defrayed forechecking pressure (which admittedly was lower then than it is now) by having a quick and flexible entry scheme. This scheme is generically called the Single Swing. Here’s how Ryan Walter describes it in Hockey Plays and Strategies:

D1 gets the puck behind the net (figure 5.1). D2 swings in one corner, and F1 swings in the other. F2 waits at the near blue line, F3 at the far blue line. As D1 begins to advance up the ice, F2 and F3 start to move across the ice, with both players looking to get open early. Options for D1 are to pass to F1 with support from F2, pass to D2 with support from F3, pass to F2 or F3 early (may use a long bank pass to F3), or skate the puck and rim it to either side.

In reaction to increased forechecking pressure (itself a reaction to Washington’s success on the power play), the team has adopted more of a drop-pass scheme, which could be thought of as a contingency to the single-swing entry that uses the late forward as an option for a carry-in entry. It’s understandable why Washington felt the need to change their tactics, especially as their roster got slower, but it has not been a successful change. They enter less and fail to reach formation more. The slowness through neutral has also been one factor in increased shorthanded breaks for opponents.

Washington’s power-play breakout has been a blatant failure, and I’m baffled why we haven’t seen it abandoned.

And that’s the point I’m stuck on most. Nothing I’ve said here is particularly insightful, and I don’t think quantitative analysis or X‘s and O‘s were necessary to make the case that Washington’s power play is a) bad, b) one-dimensional, and c) stymied in the neutral zone. And yet Washington has let it rip all season, possibly blaming their billion player absences for their poor production. And there’s still an outside chance that they would be vindicated in that approach. Maybe Mantha or Oshie will be back soon, and Backstrom will remain healthy, and they’ll cruise through neutral and get into formation and set up Ovechkin for lots of goals. But that would be a exercise of pure faith — hoping that the team’s fortunes will flip so that their way too common margin of defeat turns in their favor. I’m beyond the point where I’d be comfortable with holding out for hope that the power play magically gets better on its own, just because.

The stakes are pretty clear: Carolina’s penalty kill is ranked number one in the league. They would crush Washington’s power play as currently constructed, and that would deliver the team to their fourth consecutive first-round playoff exit.

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