You may recall back in September when we took a look back at the 2007-08 Caps forwards in terms of their scoring rates. Well, 25 games into the 2008-09 season seems like a decent enough time to check in and see how the group is doing so far this year.
First, five-on-five points per sixty minutes of ice time (minimum ten games played):
The color coding correspond (roughly) to the BoA groupings we used before. Alex Semin? Elite (tops in the NHL, in fact). Chris Clark? An absolute dog. Other than Clark, though, this list isn’t horrible (or horribly different from last year’s full-season numbers other than Semin, Clark and some better production from Sergei Fedorov), which is to be expected from a team that has been good five-on-five.
Moving on to the power play, here’s what we’re looking at in terms of points per sixty minutes of ice time:
Again, the color tells the story. Tomas Fleischmann and Nicklas Backstrom? Wow. Viktor Kozlov and Semin? Excellent. Alexander Ovechkin and Brooks Laich? Capable. The others? Not so much. Interestingly, the power play has gone 7-for-28 in Mike Green‘s absence, so the under-performers here don’t have that excuse to fall back on.
So that’s more or less a data dump with hardly a surprise in it (other than, perhaps, the power-play prowess of secondary threats Flash and Kozlov and the extra man ineptitude of the elder playmaking pivots). Does anything else jump out at you?