The Alex Ovechkin project: Snapshot

The Washington Capitals are a bottom-ten team when measured by expected-goal share during five-on-five and a bottom-five team when measured by actual goals during five-on-five. And yet they’re still in the middle of the standings. A big chunk of that mismatch comes from Washington’s tendency to win games close and lose them gruesomely, but how you interpret that gap tells me what kind of person you are.

• Are the Capitals undeserving of their success? Are they skipping along, happily ignorant of impending doom? Or
• do they have the killer instinct to win? Are they simply doing what it takes to win games, all underlying data be damned. Or
• do they room for improvement and even better success in 2024?

It’s not the middle one. I have no time for that post-hoc, narrative-first silliness. (I have lots of time for lots of other kinds of silliness.) But I don’t think it’s entirely the first one either. Personally, I think the Capitals are a team in a state of change, and I think that change should be for the better next year. Especially if Alex Ovechkin gets going. So let’s talk about how.

Forwards

Defenders

Glossary

• TOI – Time on ice in minutes. Only five-on-five play is included here.
• SA% – Shot-attempt percentage. The share of total shots attempted by Washington while the skater is on the ice during five-on-five play. 50 percent means even.
• xGF% – Expected goals percentage. The share of expected goals generated by Washington while the skate is on the ice during five-on-five play. Expected goals weights how likely to become a goal each attempted shot is. 50 percent means even.
• GF% – Goals-for percentage. The share of total goals scored by Washington when the skater is on the ice during five-on-five play. 50 percent means even.
• PDO – The sum of Washington’s shooting percentage and saving percentage when the skater is on the ice during five-on-five play. One means league average. The acronym doesn’t stand for anything, and yes, I hate it.

Notes

• The only Caps players to outshoot opponents this month (i.e. to have an on-ice shot-attempt percentage above even at 50) were Strome, Ovechkin, and Edmundson. Everyone else was in the red, but even good puck possession didn’t mean good results for these three. The Caps were outscored 13 to 6 during Alex Ovechkin‘s December shifts, second-worst on the team behind poor Rasmus Sandin.
• Sandin had been skating mostly with Trevor van Riemsdyk. I don’t want to say that pairing isn’t working because it’s not like Carbery has unlimited options on how he puts his D together. It’s enough to say that the whole defense is struggling: all players are under 50 percent in attempts, expected goals, and actual goals. Only three pairings have played together for more than 30 minutes and ended up on the right side of fifty: Fehervary-Carlson, Sandin-TVR, and Edmundson-Carlson. Notice that Carlson’s name is on their twice and Jensen’s is not at all. I hope Martin Fehervary (top of our stack ranking based on on-ice shot-attempt percentage, or SA%, as well as expected-goals percentage) can return soon, and I hope Ethan Bear can help.
• Back to Ovechkin, who has the worst goals-for percentage (33.3 GF%) among active players despite having the third best shot-attempt percentage (behind common linemates Strome and Wilson). Ovechkin’s terrible luck (is that still the right word?) continues unabated. If you take every player’s on-ice goal differential and put it against their expected-goal differential, Ovi is in the hinterlands.

• There are five NHL forwards who fare worse in this stat, and three of them play for the goalie-afflicted Hurricanes. Goalie-ing isn’t great for Ovechkin either, but the real fault remains his on-ice shooting percentage, 5.5, where he sits in the league’s 10th percentile.
• To get way more theoretical, Ovechkin is “due” almost five individual goals during five on five, plus three more on the power play. His linemates are “due” another five. Using conservative estimates, that’s like 4-5 standings points right there that the Caps “should” have. This is all recklessly suppositional; I’m going “wild” with the scare quotes, so please don’t take those numbers “to the bank.” I just wanted to give some comfort for those in despair.
• Last month I tried to make the point that Ovechkin’s year-over-year shot-volume downturn was the result of playing with Evgeny Kuznetsov. But they played together for only 25 minutes this month, and Ovechkin’s individual rates were still down: down 6.8 percent in attempts, down 23.9 percent in shots on net (i.e. blocks are way up), and down 22.2 percent in expected goals. So it’s not all luck.
• Besides, luck is really easy to wave away – in both directions. Ovechkin is individually an above-average shooter (12.9 percent) and is now shooting less than half that (5.6 percent). If you take each team as a unit, “luck” explains the majority of the gap between their shooting percentage and the rest of the league. But for an individual, where shooting percentage describes a somewhat repeatable skill (when observed in a big enough sample size), it’s more fraught to simply say that Ovechkin’s goal downturn – over the course of 34 games – is mostly due to random chance, especially knowing that his attempt rates are down too. Luck is absolutely a part of it, and I insist it’s the biggest part of it given the profile of Ovechkin’s offense (still really good except for the in-the-net part!), but it doesn’t mean the team shouldn’t be aggressively plotting ways to help him out.
• Helping him out could mean putting Connor McMichael as his center, which the team did for a couple periods after the Christmas break. McMichael is the team’s best neutral-zone forward (based on zone exits and zone entries, marked in pink below, as measured by Corey Sznadjer’s All Three Zones), and that’s been why his linemate Anthony Mantha almost doubles up the next Caps player in goal rate (1.67 per hour, 98th percentile in the league, and it’s almost all rush goals). I’m not sure if McMichael would be the right complement to Ovechkin though. He’s not great at winning battles in either zone, and he’s not an elite passer in cycling situations. Yet. He’s got years to go before we should expect peak McMike.

• If McMichael could improve getting the puck back in the defensive zone, his line would be a great option to take more defensive-zone faceoffs, which right now are the near-exclusive purview of Nic Dowd. And boy is that some trouble.
• The Capitals actually outscored opponents 4 to 3 during Dowd’s shifts in the month of December, which is incredible given opponents had 7.8 expected goals to the Capitals’ 4.5 in the same span. Opponents got 34 high-danger chances and converted just one of them, which means goalies are really saving the fourth line’s bacon, as we can see partially in Dowd’s 1.06 PDO, which is a sum of his goalie’s save percentage, 96.0, and his team’s shooting percentage, 9.7, when he’s on the ice). As much as Washington’s last four games have been a disappointment, it will get far far worse when their bottom line stops enjoying 95th percentile PDO, a function of luck, on 99th percentile defensive-zone starts, a coaching decision.
• This is not a condemnation of Dowd’s play. I think he and his linemates have done a laudable job limiting slot shots despite their deployments. In the heatmap below from HockeyViz, red blobs mean opponents take more shots from those locations compared to league average. Note the big cool spot in the middle; that’s hard work from him and Malenstyn and Aube-Kubel – and something the rest of the team isn’t great at lately. (The crease is another matter.)

• Another moment of positivity: it appears Evgeny Kuznetsov is trying again. He’s still last among non-fourth-line forwards in underlying stats (42.9 percent of shot attempts, SA%, belonging to Washington), but his unplayable streak seems to be over. He’s above the “yikes” line of forty percent in attempts, expected goals, and high-danger chances over the last ten games. Kuznetsov regaining even some of his old form would be a major boon to the Caps, perhaps second only to Ovechkin’s scoring progressing to the mean.

• It’s a good thing we don’t discuss the power play in the snapshot, or else the positivity would end there.
• Some predictions for 2024: more goals from Ovechkin, obviously. Kuznetsov’s due to hit the back of the net more too. The fourth line’s deployments start hurting. Continued success for Protas-McMichael-Mantha, but Pacioretty’s arrival and Oshie’s return force a lineup disruption and may instigate a trade. That trade should return a defender, unless Bear is a cure-all, which I don’t think is the case.
• I have removed Nicklas Backstrom from the snapshot.

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Headline photo: Alan Dobbins/RMNB