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With or Without You at Five-on-Five

That the Washington Capitals are a better team with Alex Ovechkin on the ice at five-on-five than with him on the bench would probably be the least controversial assertion made in this space since we referred to Dane Cook as “unfunny.” But how do we quantify how much better the Caps were during AO’s shifts?

It’s rather simple, really – take a look at the team’s plus-minus while he was on the ice and compare it to the plus-minus rate when he was off the ice (thanks, BtN!). Needless to say, a positive differential here (i.e. a better +/-ON than +/-OFF) indicates that the team was better off with him than without him.

With that introduction out of the way, let’s take a look at the numbers for the skaters who played at least twenty games for the Caps, with quality of competition and teammates thrown in for context (remember, this is all five-on-five):


Player QualComp QualTeam +/- ON/60
+/- OFF/60 Δ
Alexander Semin 0.023 0.254 1.84 0.06 1.78
Mike Green -0.006 0.108 1.37 0.03 1.34
Nicklas Backstrom -0.015 0.144 1.01 0.07 0.94
Tyler Sloan -0.002 -0.178 1.00 0.15 0.85
Sergei Fedorov -0.001 0.206 0.85 0.07 0.78
Alex Ovechkin -0.014 0.241 0.81 0.31 0.50
Eric Fehr -0.001 -0.038 0.85 0.39 0.46
Jeff Schultz -0.005 0.095 0.61 0.28 0.33
Brooks Laich -0.004 0.006 0.46 0.34 0.12
Shaone Morrisonn -0.018 0.109 0.06 0.19 -0.13
Tomas Fleischmann 0.010 0.079 0.15 0.31 -0.16
Michael Nylander -0.042 0.028 0.15 0.49 -0.34
Milan Jurcina -0.038 -0.116 0.10 0.45 -0.35
Matt Bradley -0.049 -0.318 -0.08 0.46 -0.54
David Steckel -0.035 -0.206 -0.16 0.45 -0.61
John Erskine -0.059 0.118 -0.08 0.61 -0.69
Viktor Kozlov -0.032 0.236 -0.28 0.46 -0.74
Tom Poti 0.053 0.076 0.00 0.82 -0.82
Karl Alzner 0.003 -0.130 0.00 0.86 -0.86
Chris Clark -0.015 -0.067 -0.55 0.66 -1.21
Boyd Gordon -0.047 -0.339 -0.60 0.71 -1.31
Donald Brashear -0.097 -0.498 -0.70 0.67 -1.37

And, just for fun, the two new guys:


Player QualComp QualTeam +/- ON/60
+/- OFF/60 Δ
Brendan Morrison -0.076 0.044 0.47 0.09 0.38
Mike Knuble 0.040 0.335 0.23 0.16 0.07

Alright, so what’ve we got? A few observations:

There’s more to take away from these numbers, but that’s a start. You guys can finish it in the comments.

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