snapshot

No talking about goalies: snapshot 4

The regular season is over. The playoffs await. This is no time for silliness, but let’s play a quick game anyway.

Here are two teams, Team A and Team B.

Who are the two teams? We’ll find out at the bottom of the snapshot. By the way, let’s do the final snapshot of the year. No discussing goalies allowed.

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Good news and bad news: snapshot 3

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that we know what’s wrong with the Caps. The bad news it is:

• bad goaltending,
• bad play during five-on-five, and
• a very bad power play

Here comes the snapshot. It’s no disco.

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Bad things considered: snapshot 2

The Washington Capitals are 4-4-2 in their last ten games, placing them sixth out of the eight Metropolitan teams, one of which is Philadelphia, who haven’t won a game in regulation since December 14.

This is not to say Washington is bad; they’re not. But they’ve got some discrete problems that have gone unaddressed for too long. And the solutions they’re reportedly “considering” are even worse.

It’s time to do the snapshot.

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This is fine: snapshot 1

The Washington Capitals are in the bottom half of the Metro division standings, having just lost a winnable intra-division game to the Flyers. Their once-vaunted power play is in the league’s bottom third. They’ve lost every overtime opportunity they’ve had. And now they’re missing basically their entire second line for more than a month.

Today in the snapshot: This is fine. No, seriously. There’s lot of good news too.

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One fatal flaw: April snapshot

The Washington Capitals have eight games remaining in a very irregular regular season. These last few games will be massively important for many reasons, but much has already been settled:

The Caps will make the playoffs. Despite losing Jakub Vrana, they have a lot of high-end scoring talent. Despite brutal deployments, they have strong forward depth. Despite some liabilities, their defense is above average.

Overall, and despite predictions to the contrary, the Capitals are still a damn good hockey team.

We can say all this because we have the confidence granted to us by the standings (first place in the East by a point) and by the deeper data this snapshot exercise explores. But that data also gives me the confidence to say I’m not at all confident in the Capitals’ goalies.

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At last, the Kuznetsov solution: March snapshot

Hello. I’m Peter. This is the snapshot column. Since 2013, this is the place where we check in on how Washington Capitals skaters are playing by using numbers, except we try very hard not to be boring in the process. The numbers are just the starting point, and from them we find interesting stuff and then maybe go a level or two deeper by asking why or how the numbers came about. Sometimes that gives us suggestions on how the Caps could play better, or maybe explanations for why they’re doing poorly, or just highlight some stuff for us to watch for in future games. In any result, it’s an exercise for exploring what we know and what we don’t about hockey.

The Capitals are 27 games into the season, and I’ve deliberately waited until now to begin this column. For a bunch of reasons, I had not put much faith into the data until now. In addition to the usual small-sample-size skittishness, I was irked by the absence of the Washington core due to COVID protocol, and a little concerned about how trustworthy early returns could be when the Caps were facing the same three teams every other night for three weeks. To me, January and a bit of February were just exhibition hockey, but now that the team is mostly healthy and they’ve got a lot of games under their belt, I’m finally ready to talk about it.

In this week’s snapshot, I’m finally ready to talk about how Peter Laviolette has fixed* Evgeny Kuznetsov.

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Black swan and beyond: Snapshot 5

The Washington Capitals’ season has ended — at least for now —  in a way none of us could have predicted. The coronavirus has “paused” the NHL season, leaving the Caps alone to consider their fortunes. They’ve been a mediocre .500 team since around Christmas, but they still own first place in the division. They’ve got star talent and a deep roster, but they have played some devastatingly bad games recently.

In this week’s snapshot, I want us to carve out a tiny corner of our minds where we can talk about and think about hockey nerdery, free of blackpilled geohell worry. In this space, we’ll wonder what it might look like when the world and the sport and the Caps finally emerge from the pandemic. In this space, we will keep calm and carry on without putting anyone at risk. And we will do what Chuck Noland in Cast Away says about living in troubled times: “Keep breathing, because tomorrow the sun will rise. Who knows what the tide could bring?”

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Weird time to start sucking, but okay: Snapshot 4

We’re about to do the snapshot, but we’re gonna have to go a bit deeper than usual.

The typical data in this column includes the whole season to date. In that sample the Caps look great: top ten in controlling shot attempts, top-half in expected goals, a mortal lock for the playoffs. But since the all-star break, the picture is not so rosy: just 15th in controlling shot attempts, 23rd in expected goals, and the 25th best record in the league.

In today’s snapshot, we look around the room, make panicked eye contact with each other, and mouth the word yikes. This is not where the Caps want to be right now.

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Maybe we’re all just spoiled: Snapshot 3

Chris, Ian, and I had a spirited conversation about the Washington Capitals during their 5-1 loss to the Devils on Saturday night. The three of us spent a lot of time bemoaning how bad the Caps were playing before we all realized that they were still the best team in the NHL. We had cycled through our worries — Braden Holtby’s apparent downturn and Nick Jensen’s disastrous results in particular — and then we collectively noticed that the Washington Capitals of January 2020 are way better than the Capitals of January 2019 — and even better still than the eventual-champion Capitals of January 2018.

If you were handed a report card for the Capitals right now, there would be A‘s and smiley faces everywhere. Whatever anguish we’re feeling is because of the sharp contrast between the team’s bright, long-term success and some far more fleeting dark spots.

In this snapshot, we look at the shade while enjoying the sunshine.

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Backstrom’s back, alright: Snapshot 2

Despite missing their top-line center for eight games, the Washington Capitals currently lead the division, conference and league. They’ve taken nearly 80 percent of available standings points so far, putting them on an absurd 128-point pace. They’re getting a Norris-caliber season from John Carlson, a breakout season from Jakub Vrana, and they might have the best fourth line in the league.

There is certainly adversity coming. The schedule gets no kinder at the end of the calendar year, and there are some worrying gaps in the lineup, but the looming return of Nicklas Backstrom might be a miracle cure.

Let’s do the snapshot.

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