The Washington Capitals and Scoring Chances

War On Ice has once again outdone themselves, their most recent feat being the addition of scoring chances to their online stats database. You should really read the full post on their website, but here’s the quick hit on what counts as a scoring chance:

In the low danger zone, unblocked rebounds and rush shots only.

In the medium danger zone, all unblocked shots.

In the high danger zone, all shot attempts (since blocked shots taken here may be more representative of more “wide-open nets”, though we don’t know this for sure.)

There are a few caveats we should note/examine before we go into depth about how the Capitals do in terms of scoring chances, thankfully statistical analyst Stephen Burtch has already gone over them for us:

So while keeping the true value of this data in mind, let’s look at how the Capitals have stacked up when compared to the rest of the league in terms of five-on-five scoring chances:

Edit: War On Ice has released a follow up post on scoring chances that actually shows that there is more predictive value in SCF% (scoring chance for) than CF% (Corsi for) in terms of predicting future goals. That article can be viewed here. There is still some questions about the repeatability of the stat that will need to be explored. Thanks to Sebmono for pointing out the new article.

It’s kind of hard to see on there, but the Capitals look very good. They generate lots of scoring chances without giving up many themselves. While the Caps aren’t quite on par with the truly elite teams of the League here (Chicago, Tampa and the Islanders) they are clearly a very solid team in this metric:

All in all this leaves the Capitals with a Scoring Chance-For percent of 53.6, good for fifth-best in the League. That’s significantly higher than the Capitals’ rank in most puck possession metrics (like score adjusted Corsi), in which they’re more middle-of-the-pack.

How have they gotten there? Let’s take a look at the on-ice scoring chance data for individual Capitals’ players:

Scott Cullen of TSN already wrote a bit about scoring chances and it’s definitely worth reading, of specific interest to Caps’ fans is that Brooks Laich (and some of the other players on his list) might actually have an effect on shot quality. While Laich’s numbers come as a bit of a surprise (though maybe not to him), generally the players that you would expect to do well in terms of scoring chances do. The strong play of Nicklas Backstrom, Eric (give that guy a contract) Fehr, and Alexander Ovechkin is pretty evident.

On the blueline, John Carlson has played close to 87% of his 5v5 ice time with Brooks Orpik, so it’s pretty interesting that they are so far apart in terms of their scoring chance numbers. John Carlson is the top-ranked Capitals’ defenseman in this category, while Orpik is only ahead of Jack Hillen, once again raising questions about Orpik’s on-ice contributions (deployment context notwithstanding), and sorta quashing the “yeah, but he’s keeping shots to the outside” argument.

Here’s a link to the data provided by W.O.I. for your analytical pleasure. But if you don’t want to go through it yourself, here are three more takeaways that are not listed above:

1. Jason Chimera is not having a good season (regardless of the metric used to evaluate his play). Michael Latta has been better (regardless of the metric used to evaluate his play). And based on scoring changes, it’s hard to see why Chimera has played more than Latta.
2. The Capitals’ second line (yeah, we’re still calling them that) had a monster of game in Toronto on Wednesday night, but generally speaking they have not been great this year. Assuming that Andre Burakovsky and Evgeny Kuznetsov are both able to stick in the top six, look for those numbers to gradually improve. (It is probably worth nothing that both of those players still see more than 50% of the scoring chances go for their team when they are on the ice.)
3. Based on scoring chances, Nate Schmidt has been better than Jack Hillen, just another piece of data that makes Hillen’s minutes lately alongside Mike Green a bit of a head-scratcher. Green’s recent puck possession struggles can largely be attributed to his change in defensive partner from Schmidt to Hillen. Green has a Corsi-For percentage of 45 with Hillen and 54 with Schmidt, and based on where Hillen sits on the scoring chance chart, the change has probably had a similar effect there.