The tantalizingly close, frustratingly far-off Washington Capitals: snapshot

This is what Chris Cerullo of RMNB fame said following the Washington Capitals’ loss to the New York Rangers on December 23:

The Capitals need a trade. There is no more “surviving” until PLD is back.

They have zero centers producing right now. They have a line they barely use every single night. Their 20-year-old winger is their only difference maker.

A shake-up of some sort is badly needed.

As per usual, Chris is right. After a brief moment atop the conference, the Caps now sit seventh in the east and dropping. A team that has ranked in the league’s top three in five-on-five play has now fallen to 15th in the month of December.

They need a change. They need several changes. Recoveries from injury, recoveries from illness, a trade or two, power-play personel patch-up, no more mock turtlenecks from Joe and Craig, etc., etc.

If you are feeling frustration from the community, it’s because we can all see that the Capitals at their core can be a very good hockey team. Had you said that three years ago, you’d be called heretic. But they’ve nearly executed a high-difficulty on-the-fly rebuild, and in the final year of Alex Ovechkin’s contract they may yet still – and in spite of all expectations – make a run at the Cup.

Except that’s not the trajectory they’re on right now. Let’s do the snapshot.

The snapshot is an increasingly irregular column where we look at the Caps skater’s stats during five-on-five play, and use it as a jumping-off point for more discussion.

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; higher is better.

xGF%

Expected-goals percentage. The share of expected goals generated by Washington while the skateris 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; higher is better.

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; higher is better.

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

• Reminder that the snapshot does not cover special teams. Washington’s special teams are still ghastly, and if anything costs Ovechkin a playoff appearance in his final* season, it’ll be them.
• I thought the team was cooked when Pierre-Luc Dubois suffered a lower-body injury on Halloween. PLD was a major driver of the team’s success last season; I worried without him the Caps would stumble. Wilson and Protas in particular I suspected were dependent on Dubois for offense. For the first time ever, I was wrong. The team ranks sixth in five-on-five shot attempts (SA%) with 53.0 and the same in expected goals (xGF%) with 53.2. Like the 1994 action-thriller Speed, there are multiple drivers on this bus, but it’s starting to veer.

• That’s a line graph of how the Capitals’ share of offense has diminished over the season. For context, 50 is even, 40 is worst-in-the-league bad, and 60 is nutso good (if you can sustain it). The Caps cannot sustain it – since the beginning of the month they’ve been controlling less and less of games. Over the past ten games, they’ve been right at fifty percent. That’d be a playoff bubble team – presuming that team had competent special teams, which this team doesn’t.
• Mid-snapshot editorializing: a Caps team with a just-okay power play and the five-on-five profile they had during October and November would be just outside what we’d call a cup contender.
• I’m not convinced whether it’s because of a general decline in possession play or just a fun complement to it, but goal-scoring has dropped as well. Ovechkin, Strome, and Wilson have cooled this month. Connor McMichael too, but I’m not sure I’d ever considered him warm. Hendrix Lapierre should be used as a refrigerant in the twenty data centers they’re gonna build in my town next year.

• As I’ve always said, possession is all that matters. Nothing else matters, and you’re wrong if you think anything else matters. Hendrix Lapierre has been put on earth and on the Capitals – by God himself – as a personal challenge to me. Lapierre, 23, sits atop the stack ranking if we sort by expected goals percentage, so obviously he’s the best dude on the team, you say. But wait, my friend! What if I were to tell you that out of 367 forwards who have played at least 240 minutes this season, Lapierre ranks 361st in ice time per game. When a player is on the extremes like that, the rules of standard physics break down and you have think relativistically. Except I don’t understand relativity and also I don’t understand what’s going on with Lapierre. He’s on the right side of the ice in his shifts, the game pace is unremarkable, and he’s even got solid shot quality, but that’s the on-ice part. Lapierre is individually contributing about 15 percent of offensive events – average among forwards is just below 30 percent. And, most conspicuously, guy’s got zero goals. Among forwards with zero actual goals, only one guy has more individual expected goals: Buffalo’s Peyton Krebs.
• (Now imagine me saying all the same stuff about Sonny Milano too, except I’m also praising his puck skills and there’s probably a hair joke in there too.)
• The MVP of the Caps is a no-brainer: Jakob Chychrun. He delivers play to the attacking zone, he delivers goals, he delivers pageviews. He’s tops of the defender stack ranking in goals both actual and expected. The Caps have outscored opponents 41 to 17 during his five-on-five shifts. Only four skaters have a better on-ice goal differential, and they all play for Colorado.
• Nic Dowd‘s play is changing. He is pulling up last among forwards in shot share (50.4 percent of attempts, 48.8 percent of expected goals), and according to Evolving Hockey’s WAR stat he’s trending to be a negative-impact player for the first time in his time in DC. He’s still dramatically defensively deployed, but no longer the league’s most extreme – that honor belongs to Pittsburgh’s fourth line. It must suck to be them right now.

• Trevor van Riemsdyk is having his worst season as a Cap, getting outscored 14 to 11. I don’t think it would look quite as bad if the Caps were shooting better than 7.8 percent while he’s on the ice – that’s the worst among defenders and barely better than Dowd-Duhaime numbers.
• There’s a thing called a warrant canary that libraries can do, hypothetically. Because they’d be legally prohibited from announcing, “hey, we’ve been raided by the government and they’ve gone through our records, so watch yourself,” instead they would post a message before anything went down, saying something like, “The FBI has not been here.” And you just have to watch out for when the sign goes away. Meanwhile: “Alex Ovechkin has not started a shift in the defensive zone.”
• Time for the irregularly scheduled ritual where I see if Ovechkin is attempting twenty shots per hour.

• Yeah, he’s still got it.
• Merry Christmas! I will honor it in my heart and try to keep it all the year.