From cooked to cooking: snapshot

It was a good December for the Washington Capitals, as long as you frame it right. Their 8-4-1 record was the tenth best in the NHL. They played nearly all of the month without the multiverse’s best scorer. And they’re already a virtual lock for the playoffs (99.8 percent according to Moneypuck).

But that’s still a drop from the dizzying heights where they started the season. Washington’s points percentage has dropped each month: 78 percent in October, 70 in November, 65 in December. And that falloff came despite playing progressively weaker opponents. In December, the teams at the other end of the ice averaged just 87 standings points.

Just six of the thirteen games were against non-playoff teams, and they lost three games to bottom-six teams: San Jose, Chicago, Detroit.

So, are you disappointed by that? The answer says more about you than the Capitals, who are still on pace to finish with 24 points more than last season. They were getting 53 percent of the available standings points in the first half of calendar year 2024; they got 66 percent in the back half of it. Even if the Caps settle, they’re still a very good team. They’re miraculously better than the Caps of the last season, having turned the trajectory of the team a full-ass 180 degrees, on pace to exceed the average of preseason predictions by more than 25 points.

So if you find your excitement cooling, keep in mind that in the preseason quantitative analysts said the Caps were cooked. Actually, you nerds, you freaking dorks, you mega dweebs, they’re cooking.

Now let’s talk about statistics for a long time like a bunch of nerds and dorks and dweebs. Here comes the snapshot. The tables below show the team’s statistics while each player is on the ice during five-on-five play. Interesting points are highlighted for discussion. A glossary follows.

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 weighs 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

• I don’t exactly understand how he managed it, but Martin Fehervary is the only big-minute, full-time Caps player with a negative on-ice goal differential: 21 for the Caps, 25 for the bad guys. He’s safely above even (fifty percent) in shot attempts (SA%) and expected goals (xGF%), so the difference-maker is finishing percentages. The Caps are scoring on 8.1 percent of their shots while Fehervary is on the ice. That’s lowest among full-time Caps; if he were a team, he’d rank 28th in the stat. Compounded with weaker goaltending (89.6 percent), that explains why he’s looking worse than he is. I haven’t been a Marty stan for a while, but those goal figures don’t worry me much.
• On a similar front, for some reason Tom Wilson is enjoying the worst goaltending on the team: 88.4 percent. If he were a team, he’d be in last place in five-on-five save percentage. That is a significant outlier for a player who has very strong underlying numbers, including a 56.2 percent in expected goals. In a curious way, I feel about Wilson the same way I did about Oshie back in 2016-17: this is a player known for one thing, but who is actually darn good at all the other things. Out of nowhere, he’s having his best offensive season since 2018. It’s been transformative.
• A thing I thought was going to change this season but has not: Nic Dowd‘s deployments. He had long been one of the most defensively used players in the NHL. I thought as the Caps depth improved this season that Spencer Carbery might give him more cracks at the offensive zone. I was dead wrong.

• But Peter, you may say, why is the Y axis so tall there? You’re usually more thoughtful than that. Yeah, okay, check out this next part. Here’s every NHL forward in the same stat from this season.

• Dowd (and linemate Brandon Duhaime) see half as many offensive-zone faceoffs than the next player, Pittsburgh’s Noel Acciari, who is not good. Dowd has much, much tougher on-ice assignments than him, plus he’s got ten goals. You can’t say enough good things about Dowd, especially since it’s been nine games since his last penalty. Straight-up: there is no player in the league who has a tougher workload than Nic Dowd, and he slays it.
• I’m not saying we should panic about this, but in his three games since returning from a broken leg, Alex Ovechkin has seen his Capitals possess just 33 percent of the expected goals during his shifts. Consequently, he has tumbled down the stack ranking. I’m willing to brush that all off – he was in the offensive zone for a lot of the Detroit game, and the Boston game was spent mostly defending a lead. But let’s keep an eye on it.
• Connor McMichael has also filtered down the list of forwards based on on-ice shot-attempt percentage (i.e. what share of the total attempts by both teams were taken by the Caps when McMichael is on the ice). He now sits just above even at 51.1 percent, and his individual offense has cooled considerably.

• I don’t know how much to discount the mellowing of certain stats – or if at all. It’s been a weird month and a half without Ovechkin, but I’m eager to see McMichael shoot more.
• In my brain, where numbers dare not tread, I think of Rasmus Sandin as an elite player. His neutral-zone play has been fantastic. But when I go to HockeyViz, the catch-all stat rating for him is plus-0.8 synthetic goals. (For comparison, McDavid is plus-19.7 and Ryan Reaves is minus-9.1. And when I look at the tables above, he’s not special at all – barely above even with 50.4 percent of the on-ice shot-attempts. And yet again, when I consult Evolving Hockey’s catch-all goals-above-replacement (GAR) stat, he’s plus-12.1. That’s second highest in the league among defenders, behind only Ottawa’s Thomas Chabot. (HockeyViz likes Chabot; he’s a plus-8.7 there.) All of this is to say that it’s complicated to measure hockey, and it’s extraordinarily hard to summarize a hockey player in a single number with authority, and that’s why the numbers are only ever the start of the conversation. We have to invite nuance and complexity into the debate. Also, Sandin rocks and anyone who says otherwise is a liar. I know Jakob Chychrun absorbs a lot of attention, but when it comes to getting the offense going I think Sandin is the best among the team’s blue line and one of the best in the entire league. Fight me.
• Ivan Miroshnichenko has been added to the snapshot, but I get the feeling he isn’t long for the big club, so let’s not waste time there. Instead, let’s talk about the third line. The reassignment of Hendrix Lapierre was overdue, but there’s still a lot more to discuss there.
• We’ve seen enough of Lars Eller (209 minutes in our sample of five-on-five play) for me to say that he’s doing what I expected: slow down play. Opponents attempt 6.9 fewer shots per hour when he’s on the ice, and the Caps attempt 6.3 fewer. But so much of his time has been colored by carrying (in my subjective opinion) Hendrix Lapierre and to a lesser extent Jakub Vrana that I still can’t be sure I’ve figured him out. Probably because it’s hard to untangle him from the team’s most underrated player:
• Andrew Mangiapane, top of the stack rankings and bottom of the snapshot. He’s been indispensable to the third line as it had been constructed. They’re dead in the water when without him (116 minutes for Lapierre, 108 for Vrana, 56 for Eller).

• If I were Chris Patrick, I’d re-sign him even before I re-sign Jakob Chychrun. He’s a lot to pay for the bottom six ($5.8 million this season), but given how bad they are without him it’s worth it.

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