By the trade deadline, the Caps will have saved enough salary cap space to finish the season with any player available in the league. New coach Dale Hunter's best alums include Rick Nash, Corey Perry and a few young stars tearing up the NHL.
Reading tea leaves before the drink is brewed, if the standings don't change significantly in the next month the aforementioned stars will be out of playoff contention on teams forced to consider how to rebuild for the future, while the Caps, with the timely return of Backstrom and Green, will be looking to add a key player to take them into the playoffs and carry them deep there.
Of course, Corey Perry is the reigning MVP and isn't getting traded this year, and Rick Nash has publicly stated that he won't exercise the no-trade clause in his contract to stop Columbus if it feels it can make its franchise better by letting him go. So a personal connection is unlikely to make much of a difference in making either trade happen.
However, George McPhee has consistently trusted his coaches' input in personnel matters, and if the Caps were able to somehow land Rick Nash without giving up a significant part of their current nucleus, they would instantly be the deepest team in the East. That said, at twenty-eight years old, Nash's best goal-scoring days are probably behind him, and his contract stays expensive for five more years.
Still, there's a lot to be said for picking a year and just going for it, especially a year when the Caps were already the offseason favorites to win the Eastern Conference and didn't seem to have any room for additional talent. Tomas Vokoun is unlikely to stick around at less than three times his current salary. Dennis Wideman is an All-Star now, and gets a raise somewhere.
In the current standings, the Capitals are out of the playoffs, but on paper, they're still the best they've ever been.
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Sunday, December 18, 2011
How to take fighting out of hockey.
This must be really difficult to understand since the New York Times just ran a three part series lamenting the impossibility of getting NHL players to stop punching each other in the face. The Times cites all kinds of statistics on the growth of fighting in hockey, and the effects of different NHL rules on the level of fighting in the game. They cite new books re-publicizing old research on the dangers of multiple concussions in short time periods to long-term mental stability. There's a lot of studying, generalizing and hand-wringing. It seems like nothing can be done to stop hockey players from punching faces, and it all sounds very scary.
Don't worry, though, America. I will now explain in just one sentence how to stop hockey players from punching you in the face:
Cover your face with a steel cage so anyone who tries to punch your face breaks his hand.
After a few people break their hands open, no one is going to be punching faces anymore.
I grew up as a huge fan of Capitals players like Dale Hunter, Al Iafrate, John Kordic, Nick Kypreos, Alan May and Stephen Peat. These were not gentle, easy-going hockey players. They played as hard as they could, pushing the limits of the game in those days, and they paid any price to dominate their rivals. In all the commotion about Derrick Bougard's tragic death from head injuries sustained as an NHL fighter, no one has brought up the way that a career as an NHL fighter contributed to Kordic's death nearly twenty years ago, leading him down a spiral of head injuries and drug abuse until he died in a shootout with Toronto police, still in his prime. Hunter, of course, was the first hockey player suspended for 21 games, and the first to log a combination of 3,000 penalty minutes and 1,000 points. May, Kypreos and Peake fought more than him some years.
These were my childhood heroes. I got into hockey thinking fighting was awesome. I have played hockey as a child and as an adult, and I have led a league in penalty minutes, mostly logged in the spirit of sticking up for my teammates (with, yes, an occasional blatant trip to maintain a lead). I have never, however, punched a guy in the face during a hockey game, because I understand about relative density, and I can easily tell that the bones and connective tissues in my hands are not as strong as the steel cages on my opponents faces. None of my opponents punched my face, either, because I certainly never left the locker room without my own shiny grate securely triple-snapped in place.
I won't say that hockey became a safe game with just one additional pound of equipment. I still got knocked out once, but that knockout came from hi-fiving a teammate after a win. He lost his balance and fell into me. I lost my balance and fell on my head on the ice. I think his head landed on my shoulder, driving me downward. I skipped the next practice, on my doctor's advice. A week later, I played a game and continued healing properly because nobody even dreamed of trying to punch me in my steel-barred, medieval armored, fist-grating face. If they had, of course, I would have been a good sport and helped them pick up any loose fingers.
Don't worry, though, America. I will now explain in just one sentence how to stop hockey players from punching you in the face:
Cover your face with a steel cage so anyone who tries to punch your face breaks his hand.
After a few people break their hands open, no one is going to be punching faces anymore.
I grew up as a huge fan of Capitals players like Dale Hunter, Al Iafrate, John Kordic, Nick Kypreos, Alan May and Stephen Peat. These were not gentle, easy-going hockey players. They played as hard as they could, pushing the limits of the game in those days, and they paid any price to dominate their rivals. In all the commotion about Derrick Bougard's tragic death from head injuries sustained as an NHL fighter, no one has brought up the way that a career as an NHL fighter contributed to Kordic's death nearly twenty years ago, leading him down a spiral of head injuries and drug abuse until he died in a shootout with Toronto police, still in his prime. Hunter, of course, was the first hockey player suspended for 21 games, and the first to log a combination of 3,000 penalty minutes and 1,000 points. May, Kypreos and Peake fought more than him some years.
These were my childhood heroes. I got into hockey thinking fighting was awesome. I have played hockey as a child and as an adult, and I have led a league in penalty minutes, mostly logged in the spirit of sticking up for my teammates (with, yes, an occasional blatant trip to maintain a lead). I have never, however, punched a guy in the face during a hockey game, because I understand about relative density, and I can easily tell that the bones and connective tissues in my hands are not as strong as the steel cages on my opponents faces. None of my opponents punched my face, either, because I certainly never left the locker room without my own shiny grate securely triple-snapped in place.
I won't say that hockey became a safe game with just one additional pound of equipment. I still got knocked out once, but that knockout came from hi-fiving a teammate after a win. He lost his balance and fell into me. I lost my balance and fell on my head on the ice. I think his head landed on my shoulder, driving me downward. I skipped the next practice, on my doctor's advice. A week later, I played a game and continued healing properly because nobody even dreamed of trying to punch me in my steel-barred, medieval armored, fist-grating face. If they had, of course, I would have been a good sport and helped them pick up any loose fingers.
Tuesday, November 15, 2011
Media Bloopers: Anaheim Edition
ESPN reports that Niklas Hagman "was traded to Calgary midway through the 2009-10 season in a deal that brought Dion Phaneuf from Toronto." Phaneuf, who has earned nominations as the NHL's top rookie and top defenseman, was actually traded to Toronto, from Calgary, in surely one of the most surprising hockey trades of the last two years, if not the last decade. The error has been up on ESPN for 22 hours and isn't mentioned in a single comment. This is interesting because it shows both that Canadians don't follow ESPN and that Anaheim fans and writers don't follow hockey.
If any of them did, one of them might have read this.
As a Capitals fan, it's nice to have shaken the stigma of living in a town that hasn't always been a home to the NHL. Let's hope ESPN doesn't impose that stigma on Anaheim now.
Of course, there is certainly one imaginable scenario in which Anaheim fans actually are hockey fans in spite of not noticing which team ESPN says the Leafs' top defenseman plays for: maybe they just don't read ESPN.
If any of them did, one of them might have read this.
As a Capitals fan, it's nice to have shaken the stigma of living in a town that hasn't always been a home to the NHL. Let's hope ESPN doesn't impose that stigma on Anaheim now.
Of course, there is certainly one imaginable scenario in which Anaheim fans actually are hockey fans in spite of not noticing which team ESPN says the Leafs' top defenseman plays for: maybe they just don't read ESPN.
Thursday, September 8, 2011
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.
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
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.
Monday, September 5, 2011
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.
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.
Saturday, July 30, 2011
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)