Welcome to our first Mailbag in roughly forever. This batch of questions comes entirely from Bluesky, which is the best place to find us (@japersrink.bsky.social; we’re also @japersrink on Threads, if that’s a thing people use) these days if you want to engage. Anyway, enough jibber-jabber, let’s dig in:
Hey, a Threads question!
1) Yes, and real soon. Look, the power play is gross and we all know this, but it’s not this bad. Nothing is. Not even the last Thor flick. Natural Stat Trick has the Caps’ 5v4 power play at 15.4 expected goals, MoneyPuck has them at 11.6, HockeyViz has them at 13.8… and they’ve scored three. Their five-on-four shooting percentage is 3.41, which is lower than Karl Alzner’s career shooting percentage as a Cap. That’s insane and it can’t last. At least that’s what your brain says… and then you see something like this and think that they actually may never score again with a man advantage.
2) I’ll admit that I was asleep before puck drop for that one, but was that a common complaint? Is it something you’ve experienced a lot? I haven’t, so maybe check with your cable (or whatever) provider. Or maybe it was just a one off. <shrug>
3) Oh, I sure hope so. It would be great if the team and the people who cover (and follow) it had more of a presence over on Bluesky. Once it’s open to everyone, hopefully they will (and it wouldn’t hurt if there were more tools available to make it easy to cross-post on various platforms), but for now, the juice isn’t really worth the squeeze.
1) Trade Mantha if you don’t have to pay someone to take him. He’s a fine player (and more than that at times), but it’s pretty clear that he’s not working for Spencer Carbery… like he didn’t work for Peter Laviolette and he didn’t work for Jeff Blashill. That, my friend, is a trend. And you’ve gotta think the Caps can do more with $5.7 million of cap space. So I suppose I’d try to goose the hell out of his trade value by playing him in favorable spots and then move him, classic pump-n-dump. He did get PP1 ice time against San Jose…
2) Absolutely… at times. The good news is he’s not a defensive liability there and he’s creating some offense; the bad news is his shot is not quite NHL-level, which is concerning (and which Luke touched on in our Roundtable):
So, yeah, I think he’s a viable third-line scoring center who can play up in a pinch, but he seems likely to be less of a play-driver and more dependent on teammates and deployment for success.
3) Reasonable minds can differ as to whether Ovi is actually adapting to or accommodating this new system, but Alex Ovechkin’s scoring chances are down, and his shooting percentages are in the absolute toilet:
At five-on-five, it’s pretty ugly, with rates in shots, shot attempts, scoring chances, high danger chances and expected goals all at career lows, which go some of the way to explaining a career low in shooting percentage (fewer good looks, etc.), but that 2.6 is absurd and logically unsustainably bad. Things are a little better on the power-play (which traditionally underrates Ovi’s scoring prowess), but brutal “puck luck” persists there as well. The unfortunate reality, though, is we’re witnessing a player who has defiantly bucked aging curves in decline; let’s just hope the pace of it slows a bit.
Did Bluesky start charging by the post or something? You guys are cramming a lot of questions in!
1) Matthew Phillips is on a one-year/$775k contract that’s looking like a(nother) nice bit of business by Mac and co. and which will leave him as an RFA after the season. Because of that team control element, I’d let it play out a bit because I still have a couple of questions, not the least of which is, “Is he a Carbery guy?” If the coach likes him and wants to keep him around, it shouldn’t be difficult – for all the eye tests and fancy stats, guys with four points in 18 games (half of which came in one game, and three-quarters of which came over a month ago) aren’t guys you have to go all-in on too soon. I don’t see a huge risk in waiting a bit.
2) Darryl Belfry, for those who don’t know, is a skills development coach. So yeah, that’d be cool. Just don’t send him to that other skills development coach.
3) Jeez. Gun to my head, put me down for… McMichael? I hate this question. Corollary: I get the sense that you expected me to say Mantha and I almost did. But I don’t have huge ice-time issues so far. I do see Mantha more as a piece to move than a part of The Solution, so I’d give him top-nine ice time and time with the extra man to try to get those numbers up.
4) I’m bullish on Carbery. To have this roster where it is in the standings while dealing with new coach learning curves, etc. is impressive. I would love to see what he could do with a roster that he really has some ability to shape. So that’s all joy, and so is his energy:
Yes (but not the Caps’ roster).
Ha. I’ll take a stab at answering this earnestly by saying that obviously in the flow of five-on-five hockey, you don’t ordinarily have the opponents stacking for skaters across the blueline, at which point you generally have a choice: try to skate it through the roadblock or dump/chip it in and retrieve it. For the Caps, they don’t have many guys capable of doing the former (and haven’t for some time), but they seem too stubborn to give much of an effort on the latter, so they turn a lot of pucks over at the line. They probably need to focus more on attacking the line with speed, chipping it past flat-footed opponents, then go win puck battles where they have a manpower advantage.
I’m not gonna lie, I’ve also lost some confidence here, but still think it’s very likely he gets it done. He needs 67 more tallies to tie 99. Based on expected goals from the chances he’s had, he probably “should” be around eight goals so far this year (instead of his current five), which is still a hell of a goal-scoring pace (36.4 per 82 games) for an old man. So as long as his puck luck regresses like it should (any day now…) and he can stay healthy, even with a bit of a decline (hopefully mitigated by the team coming around a bit), we’re probably looking at celebrating our new goal king around Christmas of 2025. To answer your question, I’d put the odds at around… 3:1 (or -300 here in the states, 1.33 to the north)?
Lastly…
You definitely deserved one, but you’re gonna have to settle for us posting a still: