One recurrent theme as the Washington Capitals were preparing for the 2017-2018 season was that they lost players. Important players. Productive players. Players they would miss…a lot.
Well, as the team comes out of the All-Star break, it is appropriate to take stock, look back, and see if in fact the team does miss those players. And, whether others have come forward in their place to fill in the level of production lost.
This is a rather simple exercise that uses a simple measure – goals scored. And here is how we compared last year to this. We looked for some measure of equivalence to serve as a basis for comparison, and we asked ourselves first, given the games played last year by returning players and their respective goal totals, what would be their production this year over the same number of games at this year’s goals per game pace?
When we do that, we find a surprising result:
As a group, this year’s cohort is on a pace to score a few more goals than they actually registered last season in an equivalent number of games (a pace for 205 this year compared to 200 actual goals scored last season). Drill down, and what you find might depend on your “optimism” meter.
First, there is Alex Ovechkin, who is on a pace to record another 50-goal season. On the one hand, it is amazing, he is a freak of nature, he further cements his position as the greatest goal scorer of this generation, if not all time on an adjusted basis. On the other hand, he is 32 years old. Know how many players in NHL history scored 50 or more goals as a 32-year old (that would be exactly as a 32-year old)?
One. Phil Esposito, who scored 61 goals as a 32-year old in the 1974-1975 season with the Boston Bruins. Parenthetically, his Bruins lost in the first round of the playoffs that season to the Chicago Blackhawks. For you hockey numerologists out there, “32” is not a good number.
But Ovechkin is a freak of nature who does not show signs of slowing down just yet. Which brings us to other pleasant performances, if not outright surprising. We will skip the “secondary scoring” for a moment and go right to the third-tier. The group of Lars Eller, Tom Wilson, and Dmitry Orlov are well ahead of last year’s pace in equivalent numbers of games, 38 goals to 25. All are out-performing last year’s goal scoring pace significantly.
But that brings us back to the secondary scorers, which we define here as the group between Ovechkin and the bottom forward tier and defense. That is a group that includes T.J. Oshie and Nicklas Backstrom, who stand out in this group for being well behind last year’s goal production in an equivalent number of games. Oshie had 33 goals in 68 games this year. At this year’s goals per game pace he would finish with 18 goals in 68 games, a 15-goal drop-off. One cannot help but think that the drop-off is injury-driven. After missing six games in December to an injury (suspected concussion), he has just one goal in 15 games, none in his last 13 contests. What’s more, he has just 14 shots on goal in his last ten games. He just has not seemed to be quite the same since coming back.
Then there is Nicklas Backstrom. His drop-off is not as severe as Oshie’s, off a projected six goals over 82 games compared to the 23 goals he scored in 82 games last season, and his issue would appear to be a simple dry spell he endured, one in which he had no goals over a 21-game stretch from October 17th through December 4th. Take that chunk of games out, and he has ten goals in 29 games, a respectable 28-goal pace over 82 games.
This gets to a trio of players we might grudgingly consider “disappointments,” at least compared to last season. That is a group that includes Andre Burakovsky, Jay Beagle, and Evgeny Kuznetsov, although in each player’s case, there are mitigating circumstances. With respect to Burakovsky, the injury bug hit him, too. He missed 20 games to a broken thumb and another three to illness. Still, he is otherwise on a pace to score just eight goals over a same 64-game block of games that he played last year.
In Beagle’s case, it is one of no player being able to set career highs in goals every year. That is precisely what he did last season in scoring 13 goals in 81 games. Before that, he had a total of 31 goals in 311 career games, which works out to about eight goals per 81 games, the total he played last season. Eight goals is precisely the pace he is on. He might be less “disappointment” and more “regression to expectations.”
Kuznetsov is the most intriguing of the trio. He is actually on a pace that is better than last year’s – 22 goals in 82 games compared to the 19 he actually had in 82 games last season. And, his shooting percentage is a career best (for a full season) 12.1 percent. However, he is getting more ice time (almost two minutes per game more than last season), and he is still on what one would think is the upward arc of his career progress. In that context, he does not yet seem to have made the jump from “skilled” player to “elite” player, even if he gives evidence of having that level of performance in him.
That covers the returning cohort of players. That leaves us with the comparison of old to new players. The nature of the comparison changes a bit here. Comparing the total games played by the team to date (the 49-game mark last year and this year) and total goals of players from last year who departed to players from this year who are new to the roster, you can see the problem the Caps have:
Not surprising, is it? A club loses two top-six forwards, a very capable bottom-six forward, and a pair of solid defensemen, and there is going to be a hole that needs to be filled in. As much as the production was the reliability, though. Four of those seven players who departed from last season appeared in more than 40 games. The same is true this season, but below that, there just hasn’t been as much “fill-in” this year as last, the result being that this year’s group has 64-fewer man-games played than last year’s departed group. And, of course, there is the production, this year’s group with 25 fewer goals at the 49-game point than last year’s had at the same point of the season.
Given the comparisons of performance, year-to-year, over a comparable number of games, where does that leave the Caps going forward? The case for optimism might lie on the Oshie-Backstrom-Kuznetsov axis. As a group they have underperformed compared to last season, but it would not be unreasonable to think Oshie could shake off the effects of his December injury, Backstrom could continue to play as if his 21-game streak without a goal was just an anomaly, and that Kuznetsov could find what has heretofore been missing from his game to allow him to jump into “elite” status. What might be said of Kuznetsov might also apply to Burakovsky, although in his case it would be the jump from “inconsistent” to “consistent,” with a splash of “shake off the earlier injury bug once and for all” thrown in.
That might be what has to happen here, because if Caps fans are looking for the cohort coming behind last year’s departed players to raise their games to make up at least some of the lost production, that might be too heavy a lift. There are no true top-six forwards in that group that have the demonstrated level of performance or skill to suggest that they could replace a significant portion of the production lost with the departures of Williams or Johansson, nor do any (perhaps with the exception of Devante Smith-Pelly) seem to have the capacity for overachievement displayed by Daniel Winnik last season.
Then there are the defensemen. One might be looking through lenses a too-deep shade of red to think rookies Madison Bowey or Christian Djoos as a pair will quite replace Karl Alzner and Nate Schmidt at this point in their respective careers. Djoos has shown flashes of being a good offensive defenseman, but neither he nor Bowey yet occupy the minutes the other two did to consider them equivalent.
On balance, the comparison of last year to this through 49-games argues for tentative optimism. That the Caps are where they are is in spite of some underperformances from key players, players who could reasonably be expected to raise their games in the traditional (post-All-Star Game break) second half of the season. This is not to say that the team the Caps would ice in April 2018 for the postseason could be as formidable – on paper – as that which went into the postseason last spring. But last spring, the team the Caps put on the ice for the playoffs was the best in the league in the regular season, and it was arguably the best team the Caps ever assembled for a postseason run. It did not end well.
Every winning lottery jackpot number is a different combination. We will find out if this is a winning combination of players soon enough, even if this year’s squad has a few more blemishes than last year’s group.