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.

Blockout Forever!

This year's Caps, on paper, should block more shots than almost any team in the league. Last year, without any stalwart defensive defensemen, the Caps played defense by committee and placed a respectable seventh with 1257 blocks.

To be clear, blocking a shot in hockey is very painful. It's not like in football, where a block just means standing in front of someone so they don't knock over your quarterback. In hockey, that's not even a stat, unless you bump into someone who has the puck, in which case it's called a "hit." A block, in hockey parlance, is when you intentionally fall down on a rock-hard sheet of ice so that a small, heavy chunk of hard rubber which has just come out of a bucket of ice to make it harder will hit you somewhere between seventy to a hundred miles per hour.

Last year's defense-first strategy on the Capitals translated into over a hundred blocks from seven of their regular defensemen. John Carlson led the group with an amazing 160 blocks, throwing himself successfully in harm's way twice per game. The rookie standout was followed by constantly-improving giant Jeff Schultz at 138 and world-class youngster Karl Alzner at 132. These guys are all defensively sound players who should be expected to sacrifice their bodies to keep the other team from scoring.

Scott Hannan and John Erskine fit that mold too, and aren't too surprising on this list. However, Dennis Wideman and Mike Green are considered power-play specialists. The fact that they finished the year with 126 and 109 blocks, respectively, is a testimony that Boudreau really got the Caps to commit to a defense-first system. Green finished 89th in the league in the stat, despite that he played only 49 games.

Hannan's respectable 122 blocks will certainly be missed, but his replacement, Roman Hamrlik, blocked an incredible 192 shots last season, fourth in the league. Just the exchange of Hannan for Hamrlik through free agency this summer could give the Caps seventy more blocks, which would put them in second place last year in the league, with 1327. This would still be sixty behind the Islanders, but the Caps only had Dennis Wideman for less than half the season. Having Wideman's 126 block pace for even half the year would give them 63 more, for a league-leading 1390.

One might ask, though, how important is shot-blocking, really? Three of the six teams who finished ahead of Washington missed the playoffs. The Caps certainly didn't spend this offseason trying to be more like last year's Maple Leafs, Islanders and Thrashers/Jets. The answer lies in looking at last year's post-season numbers. In spite of their stalwart corps of defense-first defensemen, the Caps blocked the fewest playoff shots last year of any team who made it to the second round.

When the season was on the line, Detroit, Nashville and Philadelphia all blocked more rubber than the Caps. It's hard to say whether this low number was more of a cause or an effect of the sweep by the Tampa Bay Lightning, but it's easy to see that unfortunate injuries to Wideman and Green played a role in the Caps early demise last season. The Caps actually enjoyed a healthy advantage, even in the playoffs in their number of shots blocked per game over their fellow two-round teams, but trailed both Tampa Bay and San Jose, who each made it to the third round. Stanley Cup winner Boston and finalist Vancouver were both among the bottom three in shot blocking during the playoffs, ahead of only Phoenix, so blocking shots isn't everything, but because the playoffs are based on one team eliminating another, the winning team must have the ability to play different styles depending on their opponent.

Hopefully the addition of Hamrlik's durability and the likelihood that one or more of Wideman, Green and possibly even Tom Poti could be healthy for next year's playoffs can help the Caps focus on what they do best this Spring: putting their own shots behind opposing goalies.

Buy The Numbers: Plus One

It is often said that plus/minus is not the most useful statistic for evaluating a player's defensive performance. This statement makes more sense in the last couple of years, now that the NHL keeps track of other defensive statistics, such as hits, shots blocked, time on ice, time in the defensive zone and other little indicators of how a player affected the progress of the puck away from his own net and into his opponent's.

Still, for a number of years plus/minus was hockey's only defensive statistic and it remains a decent judgement of a player's effectiveness. The stat is simple. Every time you are on the ice when your team scores a goal, you add one. Every time you are on the ice when your time gives up a goal, you take away one. Power play goals don't count, because they're measured by other statistics (although these are mostly team statistics, and some more individual statistics on special teams effectiveness could be very helpful in evaluating hockey players' performance).

Since plus minus measures both offense and defense in relation to each other, it isn't just a gauge of whether a player is playing effective defense. It is a gauge of whether the energy that player spends on defense is worth it. Coaches will often preach that if players work harder in their own end, they will spend more time with the puck and score more goals. This makes logical sense, so it is rarely questioned.

Under most of their seasons with Bruce Boudreau as coach, the Capitals were given some guidelines on defense, but few hard and fast rules. Mostly, they just had to go score goals. After a few years of that plan, the Capitals posted the four best plus/minus marks in the league in 2010. Alex Ovechkin, Jeff Schultz, Mike Green and Nicklas Backstrom topped the charts at +50, +45, +39 and +37. You have to look back to 2008 for anyone else to break forty, and '03 for someone to break fifty.

Last year the Capitals all focused on defense. They worked really hard at keeping opponents out of their own zone. They played in conservative positions, staying back behind opponents instead of rushing up the ice in front of them. What did it get them?

Well, they let in fewer goals, but they also scored a lot fewer. Ovechkin and Backstrom tied for the team lead in plus/minus, but this time their top mark was +24. The Caps fell from 1st in 2010 to 19th in 2011 in goals scored. At the same time they improved from 16th to 4th in goals against. So their offense went from the best to being worse than a few non-playoff teams, while their defense went from being worse than a few non-playoff teams to being just worse than Nashville's.

It is often said that defense wins championships, but it sure doesn't win regular season games. Nashville played better defense than the Caps and wound up eighth in the West. But from preseason to postseason each hockey game is won by the team that scores more goals than its opponent. That means that no matter how good you are at preventing your opponent form scoring goals, you also have to score a couple of your own.

That said, I would predict a resurgence in the Capitals' offensive and defensive fortunes this year, simply from the acquisition of Tomas Vokoun. Vokoun is the type of goalie who gives his team confidence. Who needs to play defense when the other team can's score on your goalie anyway?

With Vokoun in net and so much talent still up front, the Caps are bound to maintain close to their current defensive numbers and get back among the league leaders in goals scored. Whether they attribute their improvement to an offensive or defensive system, the difference is simply that they have better personel.

Last year, by putting an incredibly talented roster into a constant defensive formation, Boudreau managed to land novice goalie Semyon Varlamov among the league's top five in goals against average and save percentage. This led to a trade of Varlamov for next year's top pick from Colorado, who chose second overall this year. While a bird in hand is worth two in the bush, the Caps could be looking at a Chris Pronger or an Evgenei Malkin in the bush next year, and the trade also serendipitously led to Vokoun's arrival.

So their defensive play has earned them a high future draft pick and a better goalie for right now, which is good because it didn't get them much else. The whole point of switching to a defensive strategy was officially to perform better in the playoffs. Only six active NHL players have posted a season of +5 or better in the playoffs. None did it last year.

Of those six, Ovechkin and Tom Poti have each broken that incredibly modest barrier twice, but didn't make it under 2011's defensive system. Backstrom and Carlson each played big roles in the 2011 playoffs, but didn't put up big numbers defensively. The other two, Sergei Gonchar and Milan Jurcina, missed this year's playoffs with Ottawa and the New York Islanders, respectively.

The Caps 2011 leader in plus/minus, with a lame +4 was Jason Arnott. Arnott earned four million dollars last year in what was supposed to be a victory lap with the Devils, but performed well enough down the stretch with the Capitals to get a chance with the developing St. Louis Blues next year. Because he was only with the Caps for a few weeks before the playoffs, his performance is easier to credit to the defensive strategies he practiced in New Jersey than here.

In the playoffs, the Caps gave up the seventh-fewest goals per game at 2.67, but scored only the eleventh-most of the sixteen playoff teams at 2.56. The previous year they gave up a frustrating 2.86 goals per game, but scored an impressive 3.14. Rather than blaming the Caps system, the team's ownership and management logically looked at their club's overall inexperience and a run of injuries to defensemen.

Next year everybody they kept will be one year farther along their learning curves, but the addition of Roman Hamrlik on the blueline and Vokoun in net means that in the 2012 playoffs, the Capitals can count on veteran leadership to take care of defense, and their forwards can go back to focusing on scoring goals.

Buy The Numbers: More Soft Euros, Please

Reading the comments a few Caps fans post on message boards and news outlets, it's hard to tell which direction the Caps should have taken this summer. Everyone agreed that the team needed to add more players who perform well in the playoffs. The Caps have already shown they can win the regular season, goes the mantra. Now they need guys who are best at the playoffs.

To a lot of fans, this means getting rid of European guys who score lots of points in the regular season and picking up guys born in North America who measure their regular seasons in bruises instead of goals and assists. This sort of silly jingoism doesn't actually stand up to even a cursory look at the numbers.

In order, here are the players who have had the best single-season playoff scoring totals in Washington Capitals history: Alex Ovechkin, John Druce, Joey Juneau, Adam Oates, Nicklas Backstrom, Alexander Semin, Andrei Nikolishin, Brian Bellows, Geoff Courtnall, Michal Pivonka. While that list is 50% North American, the team, like the league, has almost always been well over 50% North American. Most of the significant European players in Caps history are represented. In fact, the two crucial European players you don't see, Bengt Gustafson and Peter Bondra, are eleventh and twelfth.

More importantly, all of the key European scorers on the Caps right now are represented in the top six, each scoring above all but two guys from the 1998 team that made the Cup Finals. While we're at it, those two guys--Adam Oates and Joey Juneau--aren't exactly the prototypical North American power forwards and role players that some of the club's most vocal fans keep claiming help you win playoff games.

Between the unpronounceable name, the spin moves and the pass-first mentality, Juneau could be an honorary European. Speaking of pass-first mentalities, Oates performed his dazzling feats of stickhandling and play-making in Washington to regular chants of "Shoot The Puck!" While Oates is a nice, easy to pronounce name, that didn't really translate to a hard-nosed presence in front of the net. Oates was a six-time finalist for the Lady Byng award as one of hockey's most gentlemanly players.

Both Oates and Juneau graduated from a prestigious engineering school, and each was capable of doing the math on how to help a team succeed without paying a physical price. Opposing players would often acknowledge in interviews that there was no point hitting Oates because he never took shots and he never hit anybody unless he absolutely had to. This all flies in the face of everything hockey apparently stands for, but when the Stanley Cup was on the line, Oates and Juneau put up more points than beloved cementheads like Dale Hunter, Dino Cicciarelli, Kevin Hatcher or even Hall of Famers like Scott Stevens and Mike Gartner.

In fact, while Courtnall and Bellows were certainly more comfortable with a little bit of contact than the RPI nerds who outscored them when it mattered, they each had their share of speed and skill as well. The only true "power forward" on the list is John Druce.

Druce is a folk hero around here, a gritty role-player who elevated his game in 1990 to carry the Capitals almost single-handedly to the conference finals. In fifteen playoff games that year, Druce destroyed opposing goaltenders for fourteen goals and three assists. At the same time, he scuffled his way to twenty-three penalty minutes. Never an offensive force before or since, Druce captivated our imaginations with a few weeks of incredible goal-scoring, brought the Capitals to their first unsuccessful conference final and became a larger-than-life figure.

I think John Druce is the reason some Caps fans overlook the other eleven players in that top twelve. We saw in 1990 that a tough team where one guy suddenly, magically, becomes unstoppable can get pretty far in the playoffs. In the Caps other playoff runs their play may have been prettier and faster, but its explanation was more logical, and therefore less memorable. Druce fans are the people you see asking again and again for the team to trade Semin, owner of the franchise's sixth-best playoff performance ever and a commensurately skilled hockey player, trade Backstrom who holds its fifth-best postseason mark or trade Ovechkin who didn't impress anybody when he broke Druce's team record because we all knew knew he could do it.

The only Caps star who's not on that list is Mike Green. Mike Green, in fact, isn't even in the top five of a single-season playoff scoring chart for Capitals named Mike. The only North American born offensive dynamo on the current squad, Green falls behind two solid seasons by Gartner (16th, 29th) and three by Mike Ridley (20th, 23rd and 27th) on that list. If Caps fans are looking to get rid of offensive stars who fall apart in the post-season, it's very strange that they tend to name Alexander Semin more often than Mike Green, whose top season of nine points ranks at 42nd on the team's all-time list, and is only one point ahead of Semin's second-best offseason.

Obviously, the Caps have been wise not to get rid of Mike Green. The type of offense he can bring is very difficult to replicate at all from a blueliner, let alone at a price like his. In the last year of a four-year contract over which league salaries have increased by a huge margin, Green provides great value even if he isn't quite a superstar anymore. But the other important thing to notice about the last year of a contract is that Green's got more motivation to perform this year than in the last few, so maybe he will start to look like a superstar again.

Of course, the Caps have also wisely recognized this offseason that a Druce-like player would really help them succeed. Enter Joel Ward who just went from total anonymity to national heroism after posting thirteen points over twelve games in just his second NHL postseason. Ward has shown he can have the same kind of explosive breakout year as Druce when it counts, in pursuit of a championship.

Now lets just hope he can follow up on his star turn better than Druce, who went on to average 1 point per season in six more playoff years with Washington and Philadelphia. With six points in his last thirty-seven playoff matches, John Druce should really make us hope Joel Ward is no John Druce. Given that Ward managed four points in six games in 2010, he's already a lot more consistent than Druce, so we have good reason to hope, in spite of their similarities.

The Sun Isn't Yellow. It's Smilodon.

Somebody needs to put David Poile in touch with Stacy and Clinton.

When Poile was with the Caps, their uniforms took a screaming nose-dive from a respectable, if dated text logo to an eagle falling on its face, over a teal background.

Poile found better sartorial company in Nashville, but they've just moved to yellow-on-yellow.

It reminds me of the time my big sister and I dressed up as Batman and Robin, and she was able to halfway make a batman costume with her five-year-old's crafts skills, but I basically spent the day running around in a pair of yellow shorts and a yellow bed sheet.

In order for this uniform to look good on you, you have to be a building. Not just any building, but a tall, angular building constructed entirely out of tinted windows. That is how cool you have to be to pull this sweater off in public. A single pair of sunglasses will not suffice. A helmet and ice skates?

Those won't help either. Seriously, walk around your local mall and count all the people wearing heavy, rubber-lined plastic helmets. I bet you won't run out of fingers, even if you only use your littlest one.

That's just not what the kids are into these days. A helmet won't help you look normal in khakis and a polo shirt. A helmet with a cage over your face won't make you look cool in a three piece suit. The face cage might call to mind dogs with biting problems or circus bears, but it certainly won't help you pull off a pair of yellow plastic pajamas.

Sorry. The sabre tooth tiger is kind of cool. But it's not helping you look like a grown up, either.

It's a surprise that fashion mishaps would follow Poile around so steadily. I've always counted on him for fashion advice. He's basically famous for using appearance to improve people's perceptions. After all, Poile is famous for becoming the youngest general manager in the history of the NHL by growing a moustache before the interview to look older.

Boyd Has The Right Attitude, But He'll Learn.

In sports interviews, players routinely drool out so many streams of the same cliches that experienced reporters often don't even bother attending. It was for this reason that Washington Post sent hockey-beat newcomer Shermar Woods to talk to prospect Travis Boyd today at development camp, while I followed Post hockey writer Katie Carrera's lead and stayed home.

Woods did a great job and got an unusual quote from this year's sixth round pick, Travis Boyd. Boyd told Woods that he's just having fun, playing some hockey and not worrying about making the Capitals lineup.

After falling asleep reading through daily Cody Eakin interviews where the hopeful fifth line center tells us again and again about his drive, determination and competitiveness to make a team that added three outside veterans this summer and totally doesn't need him, it's nice to see someone who understands the lay of the land and isn't worried about it.

Additionally, Boyd should not worry about making the Capitals. If he did play in the NHL this year, he'd lose his eligibility to play for the Minnesota Golden Gophers, a team that developed current NHL players like Phil Kessel, Blake Wheeler, Erik Johnson, Alex Goligoski. He's already graduated from the US National Development Team, which has helped train Johnson, Patrick Kane, James Van Riemsdyk and forty other NHL players.

While a sixth round pick normally has less than a snowball's chance in Atlanta of making the NHL, Travis Boyd is in very good company. He obviously needs to give every chance to play hockey his full attention and learn all that he can, but it's refreshing for once to hear someone who isn't going to make the NHL acknowledge that fact and put it in a positive light.

Incidentally, another former Golden Gopher who has a way-outside chance of making the Caps out of training camp is Ryan Potulny. Potulny has mostly played in the AHL and is likely to end up in Hershey this year, but he put up fifteen goals with Edmonton in 09-10 and has a total of 49 points in 126 games. If Boyd can follow a similar development path, he will greatly exceed the expectations of a typical sixth round draft pick. If not, no one will be surprised or disappointed, so why shouldn't he have fun along the way?