Week 15 Snapshot: Throwing Away the Halo Effect

There’s this one peccadillo in hockey discourse that is bugging me more and more. I don’t know if anyone else experiences it this way; let me know.

If I say a player had a bad game, people might hear me say that the player is bad. If I say I’d rather someone not play on a top line, people might hear me say I don’t like that player. If I say a player’s contract is very bad, people might hear me say that player himself is very bad.

But I didn’t say that, and I definitely don’t think that.

I’m not sure how to do this more precisely in the future. How can we offer a criticism (or a joke) about Jason Chimera without committing character assassination? How can we separate discussions of Jay Beagle’s deployment and Brooks Orpik’s contract from descriptions of those player and those persons?

Because I like Jay Beagle and Jason Chimera and Brooks Orpik. A lot. They wear the right colors. They’re my guys.

In this week’s snapshot, we go a little bit deeper– because “this guy sucks” is never helpful to the discussion and almost never correct.

Previous snapshots: week 1, week 2, week 3, week 4, week 5, week 6, week 7, week 8, week 9, week 10, week 11, week 12, week 13, week 14

Let’s do the numbers. These are current as noon on Sunday, February 1st. The sample is restricted to 5v5 hockey when the score is within one goal. There’s a glossary at bottom with an explanatory video.

Forwards

Defense

Observations

• The Caps have 52.5 percent possession when adjusted for score. That’s the 10th best in the league. Despite their four-game losing streak, the Caps haven’t been outshot (again– adjusted for score) in a game since their 3-1 win over Detroit on January 10th. Weeeee.
• A note on my vibe right now: I’m putting these percentages into the table and I’m seeing all these 52s and 53s and 54s. I’m looking at the standings and I’m seeing the Caps in the playoff picture. I’m seeing Braden Holtby’s save percentages and Ovi’s goals and Backstrom’s assists. It’s a good time to be a Caps fan. Whatever notes follow, things are really good right now.
• Joel Ward has the team’s lowest PDO, 96.8, an indication of bad percentages generally beyond his control. Whenever I see a low or a high PDO, my next step is to look at the component pieces: shooting and saving. Yeah, they’re both low. I’ve been sort of cool on Ward this season, but his underlying numbers are fine and he’s improving shot-attempt percentage by 0.9 when he’s on the ice. He’s a solid player, though I doubt he’s spectacular enough to garner any interest going into the deadline.
• Whoa, Brooks Laich. Playing on what’s currently my favorite line with Ward and Fehr, Laich is killing it, rocking the third-best on-ice shot-attempt percentage (SA%), meaning he’s spending more time in the o-zone than all but Nick and Alex. To me, Laich is the most improved player on the team and you can see it in every stride. I don’t know if he’s himself driving play necessarily, but he looks to me increasingly as if the Kloten Flyers injury never happened.
• So on Saturday Jason Chimera‘s team possessed just one of the fifteen 5v5 shot attempts he was on the ice for (Mike Green took it). Even given Chimera’s rough season that’s an aberration, but it drew my attention to something odd: his ice time. Chimera’s been on the fourth line on-and-off since game 24, but a fourth line with him on it gets more ice time than one without him. Michael Latta, who hasn’t been off the bottom line once this season, somehow averages four and a half fewer minutes per game than Chimera. Chimera’s PK duties certainly contribute to that, but it also seems to me that Trotz gives the fourth line more shifts when Chimera’s on it. That’s not exactly minimizing his damage.
• I wonder how long Caps goalies will keep saving 95.7 percent of shots while Jack Hillen is on the ice. For all the money the Caps spent on the blue line, injuries to their youngest blueliners, Orlov and Schmidt, have exposed some problems in the depth. All of a sudden, a shift with Mike Green on the ice doesn’t virtually guarantee offense. Worrying.
• One thing I find curious about the Capitals this season is the defense’s stability. I can’t compare this to other teams, but it seems like Trotz is dedicated to keeping his d-pairings stable. Both Brooks Orpik/John Carlson and Karl Alzner/Mattt Niskanen spend about 85 percent of their 5v5 time together. That’s a lot. What happens in that 15 percent of time when those pairings are split up has been verrrrrry interesting (Carlson in particular), but we can’t draw big conclusions from that. We probably won’t be able to isolate the performance of these players until they spend real time away from their partners, which doesn’t look like it will happen– barring injury.
• Finally, I encourage you to play with a toy. Domenic Galamini has built a tool in Tableau to visualize player’s in a way we’ve addressed here a few times. It’s called a HERO chart, and it shows you where a player ranks, broken into quartiles that equate to four forward lines. I’ve done similar stuff here, but never with the great simply visualization Domenic has done. It’s a great way to display complicated information in an intuitive useful way. Go play! Tell me what you learn.

Glossary

• 5v5 Within 1. Our sample. The portions of games when each team has five skaters and the score is within one goal.
• GP. Games played.
• TOI. Time on ice. The amount of time that player played during 5v5 close.
• SA%. Shot-attempt percentage, a measurement for puck possession. The share of shot attempts that the player’s team got while he was on the ice. Also known as Fenwick. Above 50 percent is good.
• Goal%. Goal percentage. The share of goals that the player’s team got while he was on the ice. Above 50 percent is good.
• PDO. A meaningless acronym. The sum of a player’s on-ice shooting percentage and his goalies’ on-ice save percentage. Above 100 means the player is getting fortunate results that may reflected in goal%.
• ZS%. Offensive zone start percentage. Excluding neutral-zone starts, the share of shifts that the player starts in the offensive zone, nearer to the opponent’s net.

Thanks to War On Ice for the stats and being generally awesome.