This first part you know already: Alex Ovechkin is having the worst start of his career. With five goals and nine assists through 20 games, he’s on a pace that has some of our readers wondering if he’s all washed up.
Well, he’s not, you jerks. Ovechkin is still capable of obscene scoring – but it’s not going to happen as long as he’s clutching the sinking anchor that is Evgeny Kuznetsov.
In the 91 minutes of five-on-five play that Kuznetsov and Ovechkin have shared, the Capitals have been outscored six goals to two. They’re lucky it hasn’t been worse. During that time, the Capitals have controlled just 38.4 percent of the shot attempts (below the “yikes” lines of 40 percent) and just 27.8 percent of the expected goals (below the “uh, that can’t be right, double-check that” line, wherever that is).
For comparison, when Ovechkin has Dylan Strome as his center, the Capitals control 56.8 percent of the shot attempts and 58.2 percent of the expected goals. Both those numbers, I notice, are above fifty percent and therefore are good. The Capitals have scored more goals and allowed fewer when Ovechkin is with Strome, though they’re still only even in differential due to poor finishing (which afflicts Ovechkin with both centers).
The decline of Ovechkin-Kuznetsov has been a gradual but steady process, and HockeyViz’s heatmaps tell the story well. Below, red blobs mean teams take more shots from those locations on the ice, so in the top row (offense) that’s good, and in the bottom row (defense), it’s bad.
The Capitals have never had high shot volume when Kuznetsov is on the ice, but Kuznetsov’s very special talent for exceptional playmaking and finishing talent transformed those few chances into many goals. That talent was Kuznetsov’s signature, and it’s just straight-up gone now. Meanwhile, while his defensive play has become bad to a degree that’s hard to explain. I’ll come back to that.
The quintessential Kuznetsov shift happened on Thursday night (really Friday morning), against the Ducks. The Capitals had an offensive-zone faceoff, so naturally the Kuznetsov line got it. Kuznetsov got bounced from the faceoff dot, so Wilson took it instead and gained possession. He quickly generated a dangerous but fumbled chance for Ovechkin. Wilson recovered the puck (again) and served it to Kuznetsov who began a consummate loop de loop. The player and puck movement yielded no chances, opened up no lanes, and ended abruptly as Kuznetsov turned the puck over at the blue line. Were it not the end of a shift for the Ducks, there would have been a rush attack going against the Caps. That, in miniature, is Kuznetsov’s play lately: an unearned turn at the offensive zone with unproductive attack time and massive defensive tradeoffs.
Again, I’m not sure how to explain how bad the defense is. The defensive compartment in Evolving Hockey’s goals-above-replacement model says Kuznetsov is a 10th percentile defensive player, which feels charitable to me. Opponents get more than 13 high-danger chances against the Caps for each hour Kuznetsov is on the ice, comparable to the Chicago Blackhawks. But when combined with Ovechkin, it gets even worse than that.
So far this season, there have been 112 forwards lines who have played together for more than an hour. Of those 112, in expected-goals percentage, Ovechkin-Kuznetsov-Wilson ranks 112th. Last place. Their low offense is an outlier (107th place) and their high opponent offense is a cartoonishly extreme outlier (DFL).
All while that line starts around two-thirds of their shifts in the offensive zone.
There is no measurement by which Ovechkin-Kuznetsov has not been a disaster. They’re outplayed, outchanced, and outscored despite the most advantageous deployments on the team. There are only a handful of possible explanations for this continuing to happen:
- incompetence, which I doubt;
- misbegotten hope that Kuznetsov will improve;
- mistaken belief that this is an effective showcasing of Kuznetsov for a trade;
- refusal to trust Kuznetsov with anything but offensive starts, which are also reserved for Ovechkin;
- some kind of The Producers scenario that I don’t understand
Over the summer, I worked myself into a fit worrying that the Capitals would doom themselves by making medium-term investments to juice Ovechkin’s scoring to the long-term detriment of the team. Like so many other times, I was completely wrong. The Capitals have done nothing to help Ovechkin’s scoring. At this point, they’re holding him back.
This story would not be possible without Natural Stat Trick and Hockey Viz. Please consider joining us in supporting them. If you enjoyed this story, Pat Holden wrote one exploring some alternatives for Kuznetsov’s usage that you might enjoy too.
Headline photo: Alan Dobbins/RMNB
