Point and Counterpoint: Panthers vs. Caps

At the blatant risk of stating the obvious, the Washington Capitals should be a much better team than the Florida Panthers this year. Some of the biggest headlines of the off-season have come from former Capital and future Panther Matt Bradley's public questioning of current Capital Alexander Semin's motivation to win in the playoffs, but these questions pale in comparison to the struggles Bradley will face in even reaching the postseason with a severely under-stocked club in Miami.

Bradley has suggested that he would rather be on a team where players who get really excited about the playoffs get more playing time in the playoffs. Players like, for instance, Matt Bradley. Of course, in Florida, Bradley still definitely figures to play a fourth line role. But at least now he'll be fighting for minutes behind guys who don't know each other and didn't fit in with their teams last year. Guys like Tomas Fleischmann, who didn't totally gel with the Caps' second and third lines the last couple years, but now is a consensus second liner with the Panthers (if he's healthy (just kidding. Tomas Fleischmann is as healthy as Marin Gaborik)).

Why don't the Panthers have any great players to join Bradley? Well, to make a long story short, the best players they had left two years ago went to Boston for Dennis Wideman, who then went to Washington for a handful of hope. That left the Panthers with a skeleton crew in front of star goalie Tomas Vokoun, who has now also come to Washington because, in his words, the Caps are closer to winning a Stanley Cup than the Red Wings. In response to the constantly replayed headlines from Bradley, questioning whether the Caps are really ready to win it all, Vokoun says he's happier with his Cup chances in Washington than in Florida.

Vokoun shows great character and sportsmanship by praising the changes Florida made this summer to get up to the Salary cap floor. He even said that when he made the decision not to stay in Florida, he had no way of knowing how much the Panthers would improve. That's all very nice of him, but I think if he looks closely at how much the Panthers improved, he'll be even happier he's in Washington.

Florida added two very expensive defensemen this summer. Brian Campbell and Ed Jovanovski combine for a salary cap hit of 11.25 million dollars per year. Between them last year, the Panthers new top pair combined for 41 points. That's one more than Wideman had in an injury-shortened campaign. Wideman's 3.5 million dollar salary is an afterthought on a Caps team where he figures to be the undisputed 5th best defenseman this year.

Florida also added former Caps goalie Jose Theodore, who hasn't done well in the playoffs in over a decade. Theodore won a total of 15 games last year, playing without the Caps. Washington starts the year with two goalies who won thirty games last year, counting Vokoun, who should do a lot better on a solid team.

Florida has picked up a lot of forwards this summer, and they're all good players. Florida will have as many 40+ point players (based on last year's numbers) as the Capitals. But they won't have as many 20+ point players, and they won't have any 50+ point players at all. Stephen Weiss led the Panthers with a hard-fought 49 points last year--the third-best total of his career. Alexander Semin, Nicklas Backstrom and Alex Ovechkin all had terrible years last year because they only scored 54, 64 and 85 points, respectively. The panthers have added some good players, for sure. If they still had even one very good player like Horton to lead them all, they might even make the playoffs, so that Matt Bradley could again whine about his lack of playoff ice time.

Matt Bradley has been a consummate competitor for many years in Washington, and everything he says this summer will help build a healthy fan base in Florida and a healthy rivalry in what could be the last year of the Southeast Division. But in spite of all that, it should be remembered that the only reason Matt Bradley did not sign another contract with the Capitals this summer is that the Capitals did not offer him one.

Why are the Flyers Rebuilding?

It seems like just this summer that the Philadelphia Flyers traded a mere draft pick for the rights to top-flight goaltender Ilyz Bryzgalov. Then, weeks later, they were trading away their best forwards to make room for Bryzgalov's salary. As the summer wore on, times got worse and the Flyers signed retired forward Jaromir Jagr, a man who had his best days before most of their roster learned to skate, playing third fiddle behind Mario Lemieux and Ron Francis.

Now, as training camp approaches, the Flyers are looking even further down the used player lot at Jagr's favorite center from the early aughts, Michael Nylander.

Frankly, yes, we're thinking just what you're thinking: Michael Nylander can still skate?

Actually, it makes sense. He had most of last year off with an injury, and he was in a hopeless salary cap situation anyway, where the Caps couldn't re-call him from the minors without exposing him to re-entry waivers, whereby another team could claim him and the Caps would still have to pay half his salary.

In his shoes, who wouldn't train harder than ever and try to get ready for a comeback.

It's just a little surprising. All summer, the lists of available free agents on even NHL.com have overlooked Nyles. Everybody assumed he was washed up. Instead, if he's got anything left in the tank, he could be available at a bargain basement price to help the Flyers get something resembling value out of Jagr.

In a different world, where the Caps hadn't overpaid so drastically for his last contract, Nylander could still be a great #3 center for the Caps. Oh well.

Asset Management

The Washington Post's self described "stats geek," Neil Greenberg, writes that the Caps could get more goals out of their top scorers by putting them on the ice every time there's a faceoff in the offensive zone. With graphs, numbers and a link to Wikipedia, Greenberg builds a strong and convincing statistical case for a basic, accepted, long-standing fact of NHL life.

What he leaves out of the picture is that with Ovechkin, Backstrom, Semin and Green starting plays in all zones of the ice, the Capitals won the 2010 President's Trophy, which is given to the team with the best record throughout the NHL's 82 game regular season and then, with the young guns taking even fewer offensive zone draws, the Caps won a second consecutive Eastern Conference title, guaranteeing them home ice advantage again through the first three rounds of the playoffs.

The Capitals don't really need Greenberg's help to succeed in the regular season. They need help surviving in the playoffs. A more useful study would be about how many regular season minutes a player can play before having a great playoff year. As much as playoff success is about having good players play well, it's also about finding a breakout performance from a role player (cough, Druce, cough), or adding a veteran who has been sleeping on a bad team's third line (cough, Fedorov, cough). Sometimes the guys who are well rested throughout the season can do more in the spring than those who have been working hard all year.

While giving Ovechkin, Semin, Green and Backstrom a lot of offensive zone starts all season might help them get more points, it can't functionally help them get more wins, because the Caps already have the most wins in the East, two years running. They don't need any more regular season wins. They're all stocked up.

Actually, as far as keeping the Caps competitive for several seasons, giving Green and Semin an easy pass to a significant increase in goals and assists would be a terrible catastrophe, as each one is due to negotiate a new contract in the summer of 2012, and the Caps would be hard-pressed to afford both, if each scores as much as they are capable of in a season of all offensive-zone starts.

An interesting statistical analysis of last season's offensive zone starts would be how many Boudreau gave to Dave Steckel and Tomas Fleischmann to build up their statistical reputations before McPhee was able to trade the two journeymen for Jason Arnott and Scott Hannan. I have championed Fleischmann for years, but those were some solid trades from a standpoint of helping the Caps compete in the 2011 playoffs. If Green, Poti and Wideman had been helathy, Hannan could have been stellar in normal minutes. Arnott didn't play like four million dollars, but the St. Louis Blues agree he played like 2.5--certainly more than anyone would offer Steckel.

This year, let's see the Caps give a couple offensive starts to Brooks Laich, Ovechkin and Backstrom as rewards for signing on long-term. Let's see them give lots of offensive starts to Mathieu Perrault, Marcus Johansson and Mattias Sjogren, because they don't have the experience to take defensive starts in the NHL. Let's see them give a boatload to Jeff Halpern to celebrate a great NHL career by one of Washington's own.

The Capitals have already publicly acknowledged that they have achieved all they can in the regular season with their current talent. Why on earth would they start obsessing over how many regular season goals they can score this year. If anything, Semin, Ovechkin, Green and Backstrom need to start more shifts in the defensive zone this season so that in the playoffs, when the game is on the line, with twenty seconds left, down by one, and a draw in front of Vokoun, they know what to do to win.

The cakewalk is over. Ovechkin and Backstrom are already stars. They don't need to parade around, showing off their talent. They need to learn how to convert their talent into a Stanley Cup.

Statistics are a great means of understanding how one action will correlate with another. They cannot help you however, if you do not know what outcome is desirable.