Speculation: Caps Roster General Discussion (Coaching/FAs/Cap/Lines/etc) | 2024-25 Summer Edition

[zappa4ever]

Ah, the Bayou. I recall seeing Egypt there a lot, and Scatterbrain, and the rest is a blur.
///

Ah, the Bayou indeed! I saw Egypt there too, cpl of the boys in Egypt were in our circle for seeing Band From Utopia 10-31-95 at Birchmere (Zappa alumni band)

I had the hookup for free shows there from 92-98 via Mark Melikan/Cellar Door Productions who ended up GM there, nothing better than just making a phone call and getting me and a +1 for the night and the occasional drink tokens; place was a second home

as far as Caps content looks like ESPN+ has the exclusive on Caps/Pens tmrw?!? wtffffff

 

[DWGie26]

I'm not ready to go there yet. Would like to see Protas and McMichael keep this up over a full season first. I also think that as always Carlson's extremely good play has been lost in the start of this season. Tough to have a new window open when there's no one in the system that can replicate what he does

Yeah, i wouldn’t anoint them as a favorite, but it does seem like the Caps are in that second “contender” tier. Consistency, health, and continued progresssion are key. But they can play!

Sandin made some very nice plays last night….stood out in a good way.

I had mentioned this in the GDT, but Sandin is so well positioned and very quick and retrieving and turning and going. There are a lot of plays that he just makes look simple which are not. So you might not notice. Looking like he could be a 2LD and worth his contract.

 

[Midnight Judges]

Sandin has his upside. He's got skills and offensive instincts, but it doesn't pay off enough to make up for his defensive lapses. That could be an experience/maturity thing which often takes more time for a defenseman. Then again, you can't count on a trajectory - he might never learn to stop giving up odd man rushes. As it stands now, when you're in the playoffs clinging to a 1 goal lead, he's not the guy you want out there.

 

[qc14]

I had mentioned this in the GDT, but Sandin is so well positioned and very quick and retrieving and turning and going. There are a lot of plays that he just makes look simple which are not. So you might not notice. Looking like he could be a 2LD and worth his contract.

Sandin had a rough couple of games to start the year but I agree has looked very good recently

 

[notDkristich]

Sandin Carslon has his upside. He's got skills and offensive instincts, but it doesn't pay off enough to make up for his defensive lapses. That could be an experience/maturity overweight/one-brain cell thing which often takes more time for a defenseman. Then again, you can't count on a trajectory - he might never learn to stop giving up odd man rushes. As it stands now, when you're in the playoffs clinging to a 1 goal lead, he's not the guy you want out there.

I could not help myself. Carlson gaffs is my current drinking game. My Dr is pleading for me to stop playing.

 

[DWGie26]

Sandin has his upside. He's got skills and offensive instincts, but it doesn't pay off enough to make up for his defensive lapses. That could be an experience/maturity thing which often takes more time for a defenseman. Then again, you can't count on a trajectory - he might never learn to stop giving up odd man rushes. As it stands now, when you're in the playoffs clinging to a 1 goal lead, he's not the guy you want out there.

There was a pregame presser Carbs did when he was gushing about Sandin in particular because he has really worked on developing his two-way game. Specifically called out he needed to be more than a PP 60 point focused guy. I’ll see if i can find it again.

EDIT: Found the presser. Go to about the three minute mark. That is where Carbs talks about Sandin

https://x.com/i/web/status/1853172183746433080

 

[Nogatco Rd]

When’s the last time the Caps have had 3 forward lines go completely unchanged/untinkered with for this long?

 

[Misery74]

If we put a beating on these guys tonight, I think they have to fire Sullivan.

The Pens have 5 cups, but the next five years look to be brutal. Both they and Boston consistently traded their firsts.

We could have very easily been in that boat.

 

[marcel snapshot]

(OT) Bayou was a great venue - good sound and sight lines. Roomy, but intimate. Saw many great shows there - Graham Parker, Richard Thompson, Joe Ely, NRBQ, Nick Lowe, Aimee Mann, Whiskeytown. Up there with Iota and 9:30 on my all-time favorite venues in the area list.

 

[Marshall]

The Athletic Hockey Podcast this morning features Dom Lucsyzyszxizn and some surprising Caps love.

 

[zappa4ever]

If we put a beating on these guys tonight, I think they have to fire Sullivan.
/////

that's been the running joke for a cpl years now in PIT fans camp
don't hold your breath

 

[trick9]

If we put a beating on these guys tonight, I think they have to fire Sullivan.

The Pens have 5 cups, but the next five years look to be brutal. Both they and Boston consistently traded their firsts.

We could have very easily been in that boat.

This game has no bearing on that. It's tough away game against a rested top-team when they are on the back-end of b2b.

He's signed through 2027 on a massive contract. It would be a surprise if he would be fired already. The bill would be huge and would they really be a Playoff team regardless?

I think the only way he gets fired is if Sid quits on him.

 

[um]

Is it crazy to say our window is open again because of Strome, Protas and McMichael?

Especially since Strome and Protas are signed very cheap medium term.

With Ovie and Carlson still playing at a high level and Dubois and Chychrun fitting in well, yea I’d say it’s open.

When your teams biggest problem is your third line, things are looking good.

 

[Misery74]

This game has no bearing on that. It's tough away game against a rested top-team when they are on the back-end of b2b.

He's signed through 2027 on a massive contract. It would be a surprise if he would be fired already. The bill would be huge and would they really be a Playoff team regardless?

I think the only way he gets fired is if Sid quits on him.

I don’t think the contract means much, as he will get hired again quickly. Pittsburgh won’t be on the hook for long.

 

[Kazer]

I don’t think the contract means much, as he will get hired again quickly. Pittsburgh won’t be on the hook for long.

There are only two active coaches with two Stanley Cups, and Jon Cooper isn't going anywhere. I agree - Sullivan would be Berube on the market if he is fired. Teams would be lining up to interview him.

 

[Kalopsia]

The Athletic Hockey Podcast this morning features Dom Lucsyzyszxizn and some surprising Caps love.

He had an article yesterday where he singled out Sandin and Ovechkin for praise. Not sure if it's the same things he talks about on the podcast, but I'll post the sections here for those of us who can't listen to audio at the moment.

16 stats: Sabres’ second-line issues, Timothy Liljegren trade, Quinn Hughes’ Norris case​

4. Rasmus Sandin emerging as a legit top-four defender

One thing that makes the Liljegren trade look questionable is how good Rasmus Sandin looks to start this season. The Leafs similarly gave up on him in 2023 on the basis that he wasn’t a true top-four defenseman capable of handling an elevated role. While that looked prescient in his first full season with Washington, Sandin looks like he’s figured things out to start the 2024-25 campaign.


To wit, Sandin has an impressive 58 percent expected goal rate to start the season, good for third on the Capitals. He has the results to match and most importantly, he’s doing it in that elevated role the Leafs didn’t believe he could handle. The Capitals split the competition burden evenly in the top four, but Sandin still ranks second in quality of offensive competition. He’s also second in defensive zone starts, in both cases to his most frequent partner Trevor van Riemsdyk, who moved up with Matt Roy sidelined.

It can take time to acclimate to a heavier burden and Washington’s patience with Sandin in that regard is being rewarded this season. All the signs he could be a true top-four option in Toronto look to be playing out now somewhere else, a reality the Leafs could face again with Liljegren.

5. Alex Ovechkin’s five-on-five comeback


Forget the seven goals and 14 points for Alex Ovechkin — we all know he can score. The most impressive thing about Ovechkin’s start this season is that he hasn’t been a complete liability at five-on-five.

The Capitals have outscored teams 13-3 in his minutes and currently sport 57 percent of expected goals, right in line with the team average. The last time the Capitals out-chanced opponents with Ovechkin on the ice was 2017-18. That was also the last time he had a positive effect on the team’s expected goal differential.

You’d have to go even farther back to 2015-16 to find the last time the Capitals allowed fewer chances against with Ovechkin on the ice and his current minus-0.2 per 60 effort would be a career best.

Who knows if he can keep it up, but for now it’s a shockingly impressive start for Ovechkin and one to keep an eye on.

Also, I thought this section from his discussion of the Liljegren trade was interesting.

Last season Liljegren proved he could handle more and that’s the main separating factor between him and other sheltered minute merchants (my model, now with a better accounting for usage, likes Liljegren a lot more than it would’ve liked Travis Dermott’s tenure with the Leafs, for example). There’s a sense of distrust with some analytics that sometimes paint a third-pair defenseman as more than he is and that certainly applied to Liljegren at some points in his career. It just didn’t apply to his most recent work, where he did just fine in a top-four role.

That's the exact complaint I've always had about the models, so cool to see he's made an effort to address it. I wonder what metrics he's using for usage?

 

[Kazer]

He had an article yesterday where he singled out Sandin and Ovechkin for praise. Not sure if it's the same things he talks about on the podcast, but I'll post the sections here for those of us who can't listen to audio at the moment.

16 stats: Sabres’ second-line issues, Timothy Liljegren trade, Quinn Hughes’ Norris case​

Also, I thought this section from his discussion of the Liljegren trade was interesting.



That's the exact complaint I've always had about the models, so cool to see he's made an effort to address it. I wonder what metrics he's using for usage?

If I had to guess, probably a mixture of defensive zone starts versus offensive zone starts and quality of competition. The models have flaws, but I'm impressed by how they continue to improve.

 

[Midnight Judges]

xGoals is such a garbage stat. You can check it against actual goals and it reliably underrates the same players year to year.

 

[Silky mitts]

I don’t think the contract means much, as he will get hired again quickly. Pittsburgh won’t be on the hook for long.

Any team that wants to hire him the owner is going to say the analytics, the goal differential, and the 4 HOFers makes me think they should have won more games the last 2 years than they did and you want me to pay him how much to make it worth his while, or should

 

[qc14]

That's the exact complaint I've always had about the models, so cool to see he's made an effort to address it. I wonder what metrics he's using for usage?

What I know JFresh and others use is opponent TOI -- basically how often are you matched up against the guys the other team's coach thinks are their best players.

I do like Dom and I think he and JFresh do the best job of communicating what goes into their models and are most receptive to change/willing to go "against" their models. I feel like the Caps coverage/predictions from the more analytics types have for the most part been fair and make sense. My bigger gripes are much more with the traditional media people who are completely unable to conceive of the team as anything other than a front to get Ovi the record.

 

[Ovechkins Wodka]

Who knows what another off season with our skating coach will do for Sandin. All off our young players make jumps working with her.

CMM is now one of the fastest players in the league. Look at next gen stats.

Protas is skating like a tank.

Fever is a burner if he could just figure out how to play O. Almost scored twice last night.

Sandin looks much improved from last season. And I was a hater this off-season

 

[Kalopsia]

If I had to guess, probably a mixture of defensive zone starts versus offensive zone starts and quality of competition. The models have flaws, but I'm impressed by how they continue to improve.

The eternal question though is how you assign quality of competition. Can't be using the grades from your own model it'd be self-referential, so you've got to pick another metric.

If you're using points that's a small sample size that's going to be extremely swing-y, especially early in the season. Something like xGF/60 might be better, but now you're cutting finishing ability out of the equation. By that metric Ovie's barely better than Dowd or Raddysh, but his actual GF/60 is much higher because as you'd expect, he and his linemates are better finishers.

You could use TOI, but teams don't give ice time purely based on offensive ability. Dowd's 2nd on the Caps in ES TOI/g, while Ovie's down at 7th, so if you go purely by TOI then playing against Ovie would be considered easier usage than playing against Dowd. Even by overall TOI Dowd gets a full two minutes a night more than Protas because Protas isn't on the PP, but he's still obviously the much harder opponent. There's going to be a ton of noise there that'll make it less useful as a metric.

Also, do you account for the usage of the opponents? The Strome line outproduces the PLD line, but they get a lot more offensive zone starts than the PLD line, so do you weight that into the model? Is an individual DZ start against the PLD line necessarily easier than one against the Strome line now that you're holding where the shift starts constant?

And this has all been talking about the offensive quality of the competition. How do you go about measuring the defensive quality of the competition? That's a really key thing here, and why I keep making the Ovie-Dowd comparison, because while Ovie is a harder assignment for a guy whose role is to defend, Dowd is the harder assignment for a guy whose role is to attack. If you try to make a one-size-fits-all metric for QoC you lose the ability to make that differentiation. You basically need two separate metrics for offensive and defensive quality, and the latter is really hard to do and basically the reason we want a QoC metric in the first place and it all loops back around and in on itself and we're kind of hitting on the core reason why it's so hard to do analytics with sports where the same guy contributes to offense and defense simultaneously.

Sorry, that got way longer than I thought it'd be!

 

[Lou Sassole]

that's been the running joke for a cpl years now in PIT fans camp
don't hold your breath

Didn't his new extension just kick in this year? If so, that's hilarious.

 

[Lou Sassole]

Milano is hurt again? Wonder if he's been nursing it all season.

 

[Ridley Simon]

Yeah, i wouldn’t anoint them as a favorite, but it does seem like the Caps are in that second “contender” tier. Consistency, health, and continued progresssion are key. But they can play!


I had mentioned this in the GDT, but Sandin is so well positioned and very quick and retrieving and turning and going. There are a lot of plays that he just makes look simple which are not. So you might not notice. Looking like he could be a 2LD and worth his contract.

@twabby

And I agree. I think he’s an extremely valuable player now. They play a style that fits his game (imagine that?), and he can be paired w almost anyone and still do his thing.

Sandin- TVR may be the best 3rd pair going, if it works that way when all are healthy