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Feelin’ pretty bad about the Caps making the playoffs

By Peter Hassett

 39 Comments

December 3, 2022 10:53 am

Hello. I’m still feeling really pessimistic about the Washington Capitals making the playoffs, and I wanted to vent it in your direction. Maybe you can tell me I’m wrong and cheer me up.

I keep looking at the standings, thinking of which teams Washington would have to pass, and then how likely they are to do it. I get bummed out doing this. The shortest and most concise way I can put it is like this: to make the playoffs, the Caps would have to play like a top-ten team for the rest of the season.

A quick breakdown of how various sources are seeing Washington’s chances as of Saturday.

Those are sophisticated statistical models and I’m just a guy who watches cartoons, but I’m coming to agree with the lower estimates. I wanna talk out how I got there.

Here’s how the Eastern Conference looked going into Friday, December 2.

To help me approximate each team’s goodness, I’ve included their five-on-five expected goal percentage (adjusted, from Natural Stat Trick) as well as the sum of their five-on-five shooting and save percentages (aka PDO), and special teams conversion/kill percentages. The big black line underneath Pittsburgh is the will-they-make-the-playoffs line.

If the playoffs were to start today, the Washington Capitals would be like “uh dude, it’s not even Christmas yet.” But if the playoffs were to start at the conclusion of the regular season, and if each team were to play exactly the same for the rest of the season, the Capitals would be well south of will-they-make-the-playoffs line. Obviously.

Lately, I’ve been thinking of it like this: What would a path to the playoffs look like? Which teams would Washington have to climb over to make it, and how likely are they to do that? Here’s how I’m sizing up the competition, starting with four teams I don’t even think about.

Atlantic Locks

  • Boston
  • Toronto

Those are two fearsome teams that will take up two of the top three spots in the Atlantic. They’re not going to be competing for a wild card spot, so they’re basically beyond consideration.

Metro Locks

  • New Jersey
  • Carolina

New Jersey and Carolina have four of the top-ten best forward lines in the league. There’s a chance Jersey could *double* their points total from last season. I can’t see either of these teams dropping out of the Metro’s top three.

Florida Men

  • Tampa
  • Florida

These are both very good but imperfect teams. Tampa seems a bit thinner up front, but they’re getting a great early season out of Stamkos. Florida is deep, but Sergei Bobrovsky has saved 8.6 goals below expected. One of these teams will take the Atlantic’s third spot, and the other will take a wild card spot, probably above Washington.

Loffs Droppers

  • NY Islanders
  • Montreal

These two teams stand between Washington and the playoffs, but I don’t think they will for long. The Isles’ Ilya Sorokin is the best goalie in the NHL so far this season, and he’s the main reason why his team is even in the race. They allow the third highest rate of high-danger chances in the league (behind Anaheim and Arizona), so I’m skeptical they can sustain. Meanwhile, does anyone really think the Canadiens can keep it up? (Please don’t screenshot this and taunt me with it in April.) I think both these teams will finish lower than the Caps.

The Competition

  • Detroit
  • NY Rangers
  • Pittsburgh

I don’t know enough about Detroit to speak confidently, though my impression last summer was that they were still a ways out from competing. Their 46.1 expected-goal percentage seems to back that up. Compared to the Caps, the New York Rangers feel like the better team, though the two have yet to meet this season: their first game is Tuesday, December 27. Pittsburgh, I swear to god, I have no idea.

I basically see the East like this:

  • Atlantic: Boston, Toronto, Tampa/Florida
  • Metro: New Jersey, Carolina, ???
  • Wild card: Tampa/Florida, ???

This vision of the future is precarious. It means good teams stay good. It assumes Montreal and Detroit drop in the Atlantic, and it absolutely needs Long Island to drop a ton in the Metro.

But in this imagining, there is a battle royale in the Metro: Washington needs to beat at least two of these three teams:

  • Pittsburgh, 96-point pace, projected to win 95.5 by HockeyViz
  • NY Rangers, 89-point pace, projected to win 92.6
  • NY Islanders, 103-point pace, projected to win 95.2

And if they don’t beat all three, winning a wild card spot should require beating Detroit as well.

There’s another, less-horseracey way to think about it. If the points cutoff to make the playoffs in the East is 96, where it was as of Friday, that gives us a simple benchmark.

The Caps have earned 24 points out of 50 so far for a .480 standings-points percentage. To reach 96 points, they’d need to win 72 of their remaining 114 points. That would be a .631 standings-points percentage for the rest of the season, which would be the tenth best record in the league right now.

Are the Capitals about to be a top-ten team?

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