“I don’t want to talk too much about it. It’s just — it’s not good enough. We’ve got to fix it quickly. It’s costing us games.”
Washington Post
That was Tom Wilson’s blunt assessment of the Caps’ 0-for-4 power play performance in a Halloween loss to the Islanders.
Nearly two weeks – and three losses in four games – later, Dylan Strome offered this review of the team’s special teams:
“Kind of the story of our season so far. Great five-on-five, I thought, for the most part. … We’re a great team at five-on-five right now. Our special teams isn’t good. We have to find a way to be better. There’s no way around it. Like Carbs said the other day, it’s cost us games, and another one tonight.”
Washington Post
It’s pretty standard fare for coaches and athletes to refer to an aspect of the game in which they’re struggling as “costing games,” but in this case, the cliche is absolutely and unequivocally true. Through 15 games, the Caps are a disappointingly mediocre 7-7-1, with the losses highlighted below:
Of those eight losses, seven were by a single goal, excluding empty netters. So the Caps are close to having a much more flattering record, which provides some solace. But dive a little deeper into those losses and you’ll see a common thread: absolutely abysmal special teams. In their eight losses on the campaign, the Caps have managed just one goal in 26 opportunities with the extra man, a shockingly woeful 3.8% success rate, and have only successfully killed 19 of 29 of the times they’ve behind shorthanded (65.5%). Hell, the Caps have yielded as many goals while on the power play as they’ve scored in their losses.
That’s… not great.
Give the Caps a League-average power play conversion rate (20.9%, excluding the Caps’ stats) in those games and their total goes to 5.4 goals-for; use that same success rate on the penalty kill and their goals-against drops to 6.1. That would shift their goal differential in the right direction by just over eight goals… in eight “one-goal” games.
Think that would make a difference?
Now, obviously there’s some selection bias here (of course their numbers are worse in losses – if they weren’t bad, they wouldn’t all be losses; their special teams are a solid 28.6%/82.4% in wins) and there’s a lack of context of the specific situations. But that’s also sort of the point – despite being terrific at five-on-five, if the special teams don’t show up (and too often they have not), winning games in this league is pretty damn hard.
One final note – lest you wonder if the Caps are simply victims of bad puck luck and due for some friendly regression any day now… don’t hold your breath. Per Natural Stat Trick, the Caps are currently ranked 27th in the League in 5-on-4 expected goals-for rate and 26th in actual goals-for rate, and 27th in both 4-on-5 expected and actual goals-against rate. Maybe the distributions change a bit, but these results are what the Caps have fairly deserved. Simply hoping for better results ignores that the underlying process is completely broken.