What are they waiting for? A snow-day snapshot

The last time the Capitals had a multi-game winning streak was December 3, when they won their sixth straight and temporarily took first place in the Eastern Conference. Now, as of this snowy Monday morning and according to Moneypuck, that same team has just a 37 percent chance of making the playoffs.

Everything in DC is heading in the wrong direction, and nothing is getting done about it.

Overall, they rank ninth and tenth in the share of shot attempts and expected goals they control during five-on-five play. On a report card, I’d give that a solid B, but the grade letter would obscure a critical trend.

The Caps were a top-three possession team for 25 games, and then Something Happened, and now they’ve been below 50 percent for 20 games.` So that B on the report card, while accurate, is completely eliding what’s really going on.

I’ll tell you right now: I don’t have the secret answer to what happened to make the Capitals bad. That’s not this column. This column is pointing at numbers and saying with increasing exasperation, why haven’t they done something about this?

Let’s do the snapshot.

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 skater 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; 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

• We can use the Pythagorean theorem if we want to look cool as shit to our friends and also try to estimate the number of standings points that a team should have won based on how many goals they’ve scored and how many they’ve allowed. The Caps have scored 170 goals and allowed 154, but at 57 points they’re the farthest team in the league below their expected number. For comparison: the team closest to the Caps in goal differential is the Minnesota Wild, who are 11 points ahead in the standings, currently second in the Central Division.
• That feels like excuse making. I don’t mean it that way. But I think it helps understand how a team that’s still decent on balance at five-on-five – even if their special teams are atrocious – is sitting in the standings more like the latter than the former.
• Washington’s five-on-five decency has never been static. Here’s a breakdown of each skater’s on-ice shot-attempt percentage (SA%) month by month. It’s sorted by slope – from least worst to worst.

• Everyone has gotten worse.
• The biggest droppers are Justin Sourdif, whose role has increased along with his production, and Connor McMichael, who has regressed a great deal from last season, perhaps because he hasn’t had Pierre-Luc Dubois (out for at least a few more weeks) at his side. Those two played 670 minutes together last season, controlling 51.4 percent of the shot attempts – compared to 47.2 percent when McMichael was without Dubois. It is telling that McMichael this season has a 48.2 on-ice shot-attempt percentage – not great and also close to last season’s non-Dubois time. Maybe that’s just the player he is.
• No one is tilting the ice better than they did a the start of the season, but the player who dropped the least is Trevor van Riemsdyk – who has not been good (47.1 percent in attempts, outscored 23 to 17), just growing worse more slowly. I don’t think TVR has lost a step, per se, but he’s having increased trouble protecting his own blue line, according to the indispensable tracking project, All Three Zones.

• TVR is at the bottom of the team’s stack ranking by goal percentage, tied with Brandon Duhaime in differential. I’d love to poke around Duhaime’s season, but one number jumps out at me first: 5.2 percent on-ice shooting, down from 8.2 percent last season, when he was more often paired with Nic Dowd. Last season, 90 percent of Duhaime’s minutes were with Dowd; now it’s fifty. Together they had been able to eat a lot of tough minutes without paying a price (minus-1 in goal differential), but playing apart this season has served neither of them well. Dowd is getting easier minutes, but more of them, and faring worse. Duhaime is just getting creamed.
• One last thing about TVR: he’s getting the worst goaltending on the team, 89.9 percent during five-on-five play,
• And the worst part is that Spencer Carbery won’t can’t do the obvious thing: revert to what worked before: put ’em together on the fourth line to take every available defensive-zone start. With the bizarre Hendrix Lapierre situation seemingly never ending, the Caps will have a dysfunctional bottom six until the season ends.
• Lapierre is second from the top of the forward stack in shot-attempt percentage, but sitting as he does at the extremes of usage, we have to be skeptical. His minutes are weird minutes. I can’t remember him ever playing at the end of a third period until the Flames game – and he got busted for closing his hand over the puck on that shift.
• Even if his snapshot stats are mirage-y, you can’t say that Lapierre has been bad or that he’s hurt the team. The Caps consistently outscore opponents during his shifts. None of that is to say he’d excel if he were given more ice time, but rather that the ripple effect of his ice time – 437th out of 444 forwards and dead last among those who play almost every night – is hurting the team. I’m dumbfounded how they’ve let this problem linger.

• Jakob Chychrun is building a legendary season. He ranks third among defenders in five-on-five goal rate (Werenski and Makar ahead), powered by the third highest individual expected-goal rate among defenders (Carlson and Olen Zellweger ahead). He ranks eighth among defenders at power-play goal rate despite being on a bottom-ten power-play team. According to All Three Zones, Chychrun leads the Caps defense in making controlled offensive-zone entries and making entries that lead to scoring chances. Insofar as the Caps are good at the rush attack, Chychrun’s leading it.
• It’s undeniable that the Caps are a better team when Tom Wilson is in the lineup. They control 56.7 percent of the attempts and 66.7 percent of the goals when he’s on the ice, but 49.8 percent of the attempts and 55.7 percent of the goals when he’s off it. But on the penalty kill – which is outside the scope of the snapshot – he’s got the worst numbers out of any of the regular guys. The lowest shorthanded goals-above-replacement, minus-2.7, according to Evolving Hockey. The highest goals-against rate, 9.7, ranking him 11th out of the league’s 130 most common PKers. I know I said I’m not going to offer solutions here, but this is an easy one. Get more of the good Tom and less of the bad one by getting him off the PK.
• I sorta osmote fan sentiment about players from our comments and the desiccated ruins of Twitter, and the player we’re wrongest is still John Carlson. The Caps have scored 15 more goals than they’ve allowed while he’s on the ice, behind only one Olympian and one Olympic snub: Chychrun (plus-27) and Wilson (plus-17). You may not like how he plays, but the results are unimpeachable. There’s other things that you could impeach, but not Carlson’s results.