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Nothing goes right for Capitals north of the border: numbers for the morning after

By Chris Cerullo

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October 19, 2023 6:03 am

The Washington Capitals had a bit of a horror show north of the border in Ottawa on Wednesday night. Fittingly so, as Halloween quickly approaches, the good guys got absolutely slashed to pieces by the bad guys.

Unlike Cody Rhodes, I already know exactly what you want to talk about. That 6-1 loss. So, let’s get to it.

  • If you take a screenshot of the process stats from this game and just completely ignore the scoreline you would assume the Capitals won it almost 60 percent of time. Of course, some of that is definitely score effects related but it’s really interesting that you can tell the bad loss came about via individual errors and blown coverage more than persistent domination in the offensive zone from the Senators. None of that will make you feel better about a 6-1 loss and that game certainly was not a good watch but it’s at least an indication that the problems at hand are perhaps fixable. Look, I’m trying this new thing called being positive.
  • Alex Ovechkin went without a shot for two games in a row for the first time in his career. Peter has a really good post detailing the circumstances there so go read that and come back here after you have. We were chatting about what we think is up with Ovi to start the season in Discord last night and I’m personally thinking that’s it’s two issues combining at once. The Capitals do not and have not for quite some time have a center that really fits with Ovechkin both from a defensive perspective where they need to carry some (more like a lot) of his load and from an offensive perspective where they need to feed him the puck. That, plus simply the entire team is trying to adjust to a new system and that’s leading to a lack of shot generation. What do y’all think?
  • Sonny Milano and Matthew Phillips went from being part of the team’s best line with Dylan Strome to being part of the team’s most ineffective line at even strength against Ottawa after being lined up with Nicklas Backstrom (22.2 percent of the five-on-five shot attempts). The sample size is way too small, as it is for really all of these bullets, to make any conclusion there but I’m just pointing it out for future reference.

  • One line that did actually really work and should have probably had two or three goals was the trio of Connor McMichael, Evgeny Kuznetsov, and TJ Oshie. With them on the ice at five-on-five, the Capitals saw positive differentials in shot attempts (+8), scoring chances (+6), and high-danger chances (+6). They were not on the ice for a single Ottawa high-danger chance.
  • Bit of a disaster show for the Lucas Johansen and Nick Jensen pairing. Johansen was on the ice for three of Ottawa’s goals. It’s quite clear to me that Jensen is struggling out of the gates.
  • I don’t want to dunk on him a ton because he’s a square peg trying to be shoved into a round hole right now but Anthony Mantha did absolutely nothing yet again. His stat line featured 13:33 time on ice, two hits, and one shot block. That’s it. No individual shot attempts or anything.

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

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