From Alexeyev to Wilson, we’re taking a look at and grading the 2023-24 season for every player who laced ‘em up for the Washington Capitals for a significant number of games during the campaign, with an eye towards 2024-25. Next up, Max Pacioretty.
The Bio:
#67 | Left Wing | Shoots: Left
Height: 6’2” | Weight: 217 | Born: November 20, 1988
Birthplace: New Canaan, Connecticut, United States | Acquired: Signed as a Free Agent, July 1, 2023
Cap Hit: $2,000,000 | Signed Through: 2023-24 | Expiry Status: Unrestricted Free Agent
The Stats:
The Charts:
The Key Stat: Pacioretty, at the age of 35 and less than one year removed from suffering a torn Achilles tendon (which occurred just five games into his return from surgery to address a previous tear in the same tendon)… played an NHL hockey game. In fact, he played 51 of them in a row upon making his Capitals debut.
The Good: Pacioretty played 47 consecutive games for the Caps in the 2023-24 regular season after injury-riddled 2021-22 and 2022-23 campaigns limited him to just 44 games total. Patches notched his first goal nearly a year to the day after his previous tally (see The Video), and his 19 assists, 23 points and 11 power-play points from his January 3 debut until the end of the regular season each ranked fourth on the team over that span (yes, more than Tom Wilson, Connor McMichael, T.J. Oshie, and so on); his nine power-play assists were second on the team post-New Year’s, and he was one of only four Caps (Alex Ovechkin, John Carlson and Dylan Strome being the others) to register six or more points in each of January, February and March.
The Bad: Look, the mind was willing, but the body… not so much. It’s tough to watch a legitimately brilliant goal-scorer – a guy who has reached the 30-goal plateau a half-dozen times in his career, lighting the lamp 330 times, good for 25th among active skaters – struggle to find the back of the net the way Patches did in 2023-24.
“I never had a year where I didn’t score a lot of goals, and so that was new for me. That being said, definitely it took a lot for me to even get out there and get on the ice and I take a little bit of a moral victory in that regard, but at the same time, I was far from my old self, and it’s hard to accept sometimes. That’s just the reality of it. It is what it is,” Pacioretty said. “That was basically a shell of what I was.”
via The Hockey News
How bad was it? Coming into the season, Pacioretty had a career 11.3 shooting percentage; with the Caps, he shot 4.2 percent. That was Ethan Bear’s shooting percentage this year, and below Martin Fehervary (4.9) and Alexander Alexeyev (5.0), among others. His four goals were as many as Michael Sgarbossa (in nearly twice as many games), and two-thirds as many as Nicolas Aube-Kubel and Beck Malenstyn each scored. At five-on-five, it was even worse, with Pacioretty netting two goals on 74 shots on goal. Of the 365 NHL forwards who registered at least 50 shots on goal in 2023-24, Pacioretty’s 2.7 shooting percentage ranked 364th, ahead of only St. Louis center Oskar Sundqvist (1-for-52). (Fun fact: Anthony Mantha (21.3) and Nic Dowd (20.8) finished second and third in that set, behind Vancouver’s Nils Hoglander (21.8).)
Based on that 11.3 shooting percentage and his 95 shots on goal, you could reasonably have expected double-digit goals from Pacioretty, even in just 47 games. The Caps got four.
And it wasn’t just the finishing (though, to be sure… woof), but his shot rate was way down too, posting the lowest rate of attempts and shots on goal at five-on-five since his second year in the League (2009-10). It’s worth noting that those numbers were trending in the right direction as the season went on. Could there be some gas left in the tank? His microstats would say… not so much:
That’s a small sample, but doesn’t point to a player that is skating particularly well. But that he skated at all in 2023-24 is a win for Max Pacioretty, doubly so that he ended the season having played 51-straight games. In a lot of ways, there really was no “Bad” for Patches this year.
The Video: All the feels…
The Discussion: Is Pacioretty done? Like, done done? Or is he still working his way back into form? Should the Caps take a chance on him next year? If so, on what terms? And finally, what would it take for you to give Pacioretty a 10 next season?
The Vote: Rate Max Pacioretty below on a scale of 1-10 (10 being the best) based on his performance relative to his potential and your expectations for the season – so if he had the best year you could have imagined him having, give him a 10; if he more or less played as you expected he would, give him a 5 or a 6; if he had the worst year you could have imagined him having, give him a 1.