Good news and bad news: snapshot 3 – Russian Machine Never Breaks

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.

Forwards

Player	GP	TOI	SA%	SA% Rel	GF%	PDO
McMichael	49	497	53.8	+2.4	50.5	0.99
Protas	33	352	54.3	+2.3	57.2	1.01
Leason	35	314	52.6	+1.8	50.6	1.00
Hathaway	49	598	52.6	+1.7	65.2	1.03
Hagelin	52	627	51.9	+0.9	58.1	1.01
Ovechkin	52	808	52.0	+0.3	58.6	1.03
Oshie	20	262	54.5	+0.1	41.3	0.96
Kuznetsov	51	757	51.0	-0.3	61.0	1.04
Backstrom	21	271	49.5	-0.5	45.3	0.99
Sheary	44	554	50.6	-0.9	46.7	0.99
Wilson	50	698	50.2	-1.2	53.6	1.02
Eller	47	593	50.0	-1.3	52.0	1.01
Dowd	41	498	49.8	-1.3	55.5	1.01
Snively	11	125	48.0	-1.4	62.1	1.06
Sprong	42	489	50.8	-1.6	58.1	1.02

Defenders

Player	GP	TOI	SA%	SA% Rel	GF%	PDO
Irwin	13	162	56.2	+4.4	46.7	0.96
Carlson	50	835	52.6	+1.2	54.9	1.00
Orlov	50	906	52.6	+1.9	58.7	1.02
Schultz	47	718	52.4	+0.9	50.6	1.00
Fehervary	51	875	51.0	-1.1	55.8	1.01
Jensen	48	792	50.6	-1.6	67.3	1.05
van Riemsdyk	49	731	50.1	-1.8	51.1	1.00
Kempny	9	145	46.7	-1.1	44.4	1.00

Glossary

• GP – Games played.
• TOI – Time on ice in minutes
• SA% – Shot-attempt percentage. The share of total shots attempted by Washington while the skater is on the ice. 50% means even.
• SA% Rel – Relative shot-attempt percentage. The difference in SA% when the player is on the bench versus on the ice. 0% means even.
• GF% – Goals-for percentage. The share of total goals scored by Washington when the skater is on the ice. 50% means even.
• PDO – The sum of Washington’s shooting percentage and saving percentage when the skater is on the ice. 1 means even. The acronym doesn’t stand for anything, and yes, that it is annoying.

Notes

• The Caps have gradually slipped out of the league’s top ten in shot-attempt percentage, now sitting just below Vegas with 51.5 percent of attempts belonging to the Caps during five-on-five play. But they’ve been below 50 percent — underwater so to speak — over the past 25 games, placing them in the league’s bottom half. We need to be cautious not to let the genuinely good Capitals of October and November trick us about who this team is right now.
• The snapshot series is largely about process, and part of the process has to be acknowledging the limitations of the snapshot data. Checking with each player’s on-ice numbers on a semi-regular basis is great for picking out trends and storylines. But it’s not good for measuring sorta climate-level changes that affect everyone. Not that you need the reminder, but here are two graphs that show how Washington’s strength during five-on-five play has degraded over time. One shows Washington’s raw running shot-attempt differential (how much the Caps show minus how much opponents shot). The second shows a running average of those shot attempts weighted by the likelihood of attempts to become a goal, a.k.a expected goals or xG. In both cases, higher is better.

• Two weeks ago, when I asked if the Caps are bad now, I showed how all four centers have seen downturns in their on-ice results. Over at Japers Rink, JP zeroed in on Nicklas Backstrom and Lars Eller, who are both having challenging seasons. In the snapshot table above, Backstrom and Eller are both drags on the team’s possession during five-on-five, based on their negative relative shot-attempt percentages (Backstrom at minus-0.5, Eller at minus-1.3), indicating that the Caps have the puck less when those players are on the ice.
• A brief moment of subjective, qualitative analysis: Eller and Backstrom are both slow and slowing, which may contribute to the glut of broken plays and odd-man rushes by opponents that we’ve been seeing. Their other skills — puck protection, passing, good hair — remain strong.
• To me, Washington’s two brightest spots among forwards are Garnet Hathaway and Connor McMichael. The former has the sort of diversified skillset that makes him effective in different contexts. Hathaway is one goal away from setting career highs in goals and points. The latter has all that same stuff but plays about five minutes less per game. It feels like he’s one mistake away from oblivion.
• The tables above are ranked by their relative on-ice shot-attempt percentages (SA% Rel). One thing I don’t like to see at the top of the table is part-time players like Aliaksei Protas and Brett Leason. If you’ve played more recently (i.e. since new years), your overall shot-attempt numbers suffer, as the team is overall worse lately.
• How does that pattern apply to defenders? 34-year-old Matt Irwin is still an open question to me, putting up better on-ice stats than other defenders in a paltry 162-minute sample. But with about the same amount of time during and about the same period, Michal Kempny has been bad, outshot (a team-low 46.7 on-ice shot-attempt percentage) and outscored (5 to 4) in his comeback bid. I don’t want to say anymore about that comeback bid. For me the grief is still too near.
• The one player in Washington who I think we all (me included, but especially Elyse) fail to properly appreciate is John Carlson. He’s put up elite offensive numbers for most of a decade at the cost of defensive reliability. We focus on the latter rather than the former because (I think) Carlson is surrounded by good offensive players. I think Carlson’s play this season has been solid on both sides of the ice, resulting in a 52.6 SA%. Last week was bad for him measured in on-ice goals, but I kind of think that was the goaltending. Below, each pair of bars represents a single game. The red bar is Carlson’s on-ice goal differential for that game; the orange bar is expected goal differential (i.e. approximately what the goals would be if all goalies were equal). Carlson seems to be a genuine and mostly consistent boon the the team, even if he sometimes makes me want to rip my own fingernails out.

• Had you asked me two months ago what Washington needed most, I’d say a reliable, number-one goalie. I’d further specify that it’s one who has won a Vezina and whose last name starts with an H. Now I’d say the priority list has been shuffled.
• There’s an unfortunate superstructure in coaching and front-office management that can create perverse incentives. A team’s leadership could be disinclined to diagnose and fix a problem if said problem could indict leadership. Job security can seduce coaches and managers into distrusting promising young players in favor of nominally reliable veterans, or to ascribe to injuries rather than banal factors a team’s steady degradation, or even to fabricate superficial changes to broken systems in order to just plain bide time.
• This was not a fun snapshot, but thank you for reading. The world’s kinda bleak right now. As much as we say here that sports cannot be divorced from politics and power, I think we can agree that what happens on the ice is, in the grand scheme of things, kind of silly. The snapshot series is really a diversion from things that matter, so I hope we all can find ways to enjoy that diversion, even if the team isn’t a ton of fun right now.

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Headline photo: Elizabeth Kong/RMNB

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