The Washington Capitals win small and lose huge

As you know, the Washington Capitals fell to the Toronto Maple Leafs on Thursday night. That 5-1 loss was Washington’s 22nd defeat of the season by three or more goals — more than every team except Chicago (24) and San Jose (29). So here’s another thing you already know: the Capitals love to get blown out. They can’t get enough of it.

Those blowouts:

1. 4-0 loss to PIT on opening night
2. 6-1 loss to OTT on the road
3. 4-1 loss to TOR but Ovi scored
4. 3-0 loss to NYI, a “freak game”
5. 5-0 loss to EDM before Thanksgiving
6. 4-1 loss to VGK without much offense
7. 6-0 loss to ARI, a disaster
8. 5-1 loss to NYR with few bright spots
9. 5-1 loss to NYI
10. 5-3 loss to NJD, hey, three goals though!
11. 6-2 loss to CAR in a penalty-riddled affair
12. 4-1 loss to SEA with lots of defensive breakdowns
13. 3-0 loss to STL without much offense
14. 6-2 loss to COL late at night
15. 5-2 loss to MTL after the all-star break
16. 6-3 loss to COL again but Ovi scored
17. 8-3 loss to DET, but hey, three goals again!
18. 5-2 loss to ARI, why have the Coyotes whipped the Capitals this season?
19. 3-0 loss to WPG, where the Jets were way too fast
20. 7-2 loss to EDM, with goals by three different Connors
21. 7-3 loss to TOR on Pride Night
22. 5-1 loss to TOR last night, not very proud

Meanwhile, Washington has lost just seven games by one goal and just three by two goals. That’s well below league averages in both respects. The wins are narrow, the losses profound. Below, I’ve shown the percentage of games Washington has won or lost based on goal differential and compared it to the rest of the league. This does not include games that went to the shootout.

Win small, lose big — that’s how the Capitals have operated this season, and it explains how they can have a minus-30 goal differential, ranked 27th in the league, and still be in a playoff spot. It’s a weird distribution, as you can see below.

The Caps (in red) are above the rest of the league (the dashed gray line) when they win by one goal, but they are far below the rest of the league in narrow losses (by one or two goals). Then there’s that big hump at left — that’s when the Caps give up. When they’re losing, they lose big. But overall the bias is still to the right of center, to the winning side of the distribution.

HockeyViz’s Micah Blake McCurdy looked at the phenomenon and concluded that the Capitals are timing their goals well. The “goals for and against come at convenient moments,” McCurdy said on Twitter. We could choose to interpret that as the Capitals having a killer instinct or a will to win, or you could think that they’re just getting lucky, or both. In any case, if you were to project how many wins the Capitals are predicted to have won based on their goal differential, it would be apparent they’re drastically outperforming expectation.

The farther the dot is above the blue line, the more “excess” standings points the team has earned. The Capitals are farther above the line than any other team in the league by a lot. Put another way: if you knew nothing about the Capitals other than that they’ve scored 195 goals and allowed 225 goals, you’d expect them to have about 72 points. Instead they have 81.

That’s because of those “convenient” goals. When the Caps have a one-goal lead, they score the next goal 46 percent of the time, ranked 27th. But when they’re tied they score the next goal 51 percent of the time, ranked 14th. And when they’re down a goal, who cares, might as well lose by a lot, they score the next goal just 43 percent of the time, ranked 26th.

In a way you have to respect it. The difference between a blowout and a narrow defeat is just dignity. The standings don’t care about that. There are five tiebreaker rules that apply before you get to goal differential. If you’re going to lose, who cares by how much? Just win the close ones. Makes you appreciate Dylan Strome and his team-leading five game-winning goals even more, huh?