Thursday Caps Clips: Caps @ Canes Game Day

Your savory breakfast links:

• Previews of the windy rematch with the 'Canes from Vogs, NHL.com, AP, WaPo, WashTimes and Peerless, and be sure to check out our SB Nation partners over at Canes Country for more from the other side of tonight's match-up.
• A few leftover thoughts from Round 1 of this home-and-home mini-series. [WaPo, WashTimes, Canes Country]
• Notes and assorted whatnot from yesterday out at Kettler:
  • Over a month removed from his last start, Michal Neuvirth will step between the pipes for the Caps tonight... [WaPo, WashTimes]
  • ...while at the other end of the rink, Dan Ellis and Justin Peters find themselves unexpectedly in the spotlight after Cam Ward's injury. [WashTimes, NewsObserver]
  • Many people thought that Adam Oates should reunite Alex Ovechkin and Nicklas Backstrom. Adam Oates apparently agrees. [WaPo, CSNW]
• The Caps are a wounded animal (sort of literally), and the Hurricanes are trying to go in for the kill. Vicious brutes. [WaPo]
• "Searching for answers" and "I don't know what it is"... ah, two things you love hearing from a team wallowing at the bottom of the standings, right? [CSNW, NBCW]
• All Ovechkin, all the time:
  • Craig Simpson thinks that Alex Ovechkin is "toxic" and should be bought out. Ovi-bashing: the meme that never dies. [RMNB]
  • Where did all the fun go, Ovi? Is not party now? [SBN]
  • Regardless of paycheck, Oates is insistent that everyone - including Ovechkin - is held accountable for his performance. [CSNW]
  • Is Kirk Muller the evil genius who finally solved Alex Ovechkin? ...eh. Maybe, maybe not. [Puck Daddy]
  • Ovi and his bride-to-be are still working on their wedding plans, including setting a date. Gee, there might be some free time coming up in May... [AP]
• Brooks Laich checks in with the Junkies... [106.7 the Fan]
• ...while the radio voice of the Caps, John Walton, does a radio hit of his own on Baltimore's WNST.[WNST.net]
• The Washington Capitals: the M.C. Escher drawing of hockey teams. [Caps Outsider]
• Alas, it appears as though the playoffs may just be a pipe dream for this year's Caps. [THW]
• Steven Oleksy's had a pretty eventful first week with the team, including his first drop o' the gloves. [Rinkside Update, OFB]
• Looking ahead to what next year could hold for the Caps' blue line. [BrooksLaichYear]
• Congrats to Riley Barber, who was named to the CCHA All-Conference First Team yesterday. Barber led all players in scoring - as a freshman - with 36 points in 34 games. [CCHA]
• Pretty cool story about former Caps' coach Bruce Boudreau inspiring a bunch of non-skating teachers to take up hockey. Wonder how "colorful" his speech was. [OC Register]
• What's even more fun than watching the Caps and Pens next week? Doing so at a bar with an intermission trivia contest hosted by CSN's Michael Jenkins. Trust us. [CSNW]
• Finally, happy 33rd birthday to Joe Motzko.

On Jason Chimera's Plummeted Production

Jason Chimera has seen a lot of professional ice. Nearly seven hundred NHL games worth, in fact. He’s seen a lot of wayward elbows, a lot of high sticks. He’s tasted plenty of puck, and his fair share of knuckles to boot.

He’s got the visage to prove it. A crooked nose hangs above a pair of thin, oft-smiling lips. Scars crisscross his chin and cheeks like an early version of Gerry Cheevers’ iconic goalie mask, though these are usually covered by a few days worth of light-colored stubble.

He’s been called Chippy, Chimmy, Chimmer, and Chimdog. He’s played on awful teams and he’s played on very good teams. He’s even played on an awful team and a very good team in the same season. Jason Chimera possesses a rare set of skills. Players in the NHL are usually classified— and perhaps too generally— by their on-ice style. Skaters termed playmakers are expected to pass to those called snipers, who ought to be firing it on net. Grinders are supposed to eat tough minutes, win board battles, and score the occasional dirty goal.

Chimera doesn’t entirely fit any of these labels. He doesn’t possess the hands, offensive vision, or creativity to be a forty-assist guy or a thirty-goal scorer. But the thirty-three-year-old forward’s calling card is his blazing speed, and it puts him outside the mold of players who tend to be lumped into the grouping of a conventional grinder.

In Washington, Chimera has made a name for himself by producing quietly and consistently, usually giving an offensive spark to the bottom lines while the bigger guns kept the gears turning up top, but doing spot duty in the top-six. A highly moveable piece in an ever-changing puzzle. You can never have enough of those.

But Chimera’s production has suddenly plummeted, and seemingly without explanation.

Last season, despite facing the challenge of transitioning between two coaches with starkly contrasting philosophies, Chimera enjoyed the finest career of his professional career, notching career highs in goals (20), points (39), and shots on goal (205).

This season he’s being outscored by such offensive worldbeaters as John Erskine, Tomas Kundratek, Steven Oleksy, Matt Hendricks, Joey Crabb, Jay Beagle and Karl Alzner. The only players on the team who share Chimera’s dubious distinction of zero goals are Jeff Schultz and Tom Poti, who have, um, lower offensive expectations. League-wide only Ryane Clowe has fired more shots on goal (55) than Chimera (51) without denting the twine.

So what could be the cause of such a dropoff? Because surely the sheer descent from career bests to utter futility in a single offseason must have some explanation, right?

surely the sheer descent from career bests to utter futility in a single offseason must have some explanation, right?

Conventional thought would lead us to believe that Chimera is struggling to produce because he is failing to possess the puck as well as he did last year. Indeed, his relative Corsi rating, which measures possession, is considerably lower than last year (down to -3.0 from 4.6). Though this is notable, the difference is not vast enough to account for the severity of Chimera’s nosedive.

One might then think that Chimera is not getting the same quality of chances as he did last year, but in actuality the average distance of his even-strength shots on goal are virtually the same.

A third explanation for Chimera’s inability to score would be that he is skating with players who do not give him the best chance to do so. But Chimera has spent almost half of his ice time with Joel Ward, who is one of the team’s best possession forwards and point-producers besides. Chimera’s second most common skate-mate? One Mike Ribeiro, he of 28 points, 19 of which have been achieved by dishing the puck, in 25 games. So it’s pretty clear the people around Chimera aren’t the problem.

So maybe the toughness of the competition he’s going up against is the problem? Well, last year Chimera was thriving in tough minutes, and with more starts outside the offensive zone than within. Jason is actually being assigned to lesser competition this year, and is being defeated by them, as evidenced by the chart below.

[Visualization courtesy of Rob Vollman]

So finally we come to the great leveler: luck. Chimera’s on-ice shooting percentage, which takes the shooting percentages of him and his teammates while he’s on the ice, was 7.8% during his 20-goal campaign. This year it’s down to 6.25%, a drop, but again that’s not a big enough difference to explain Chimera’s drop-off, let alone the goose egg.

If we’re to stay outside the realm of rampant speculation and "eye tests," it’s difficult to pinpoint a reason for Chimera’s decline - perhaps the answer is "all of the above." And the best we can offer as a fix is a simple one - keep shooting the puck and the points will come.

Or perhaps Chimera could use a change of scenery, cliché as that idea is. With the trade deadline looming, the speedy winger may garner some interest, especially if his luck turns around a bit; he doesn’t command much money, and amidst this awful season, George McPhee could hardly ask for much in return. Chimera has been effective in the post-season since coming to Washington, and his penchant for performing well in the tighter ice of the playoffs is likely to attract some suitors.

In many ways, Jason Chimera's 2013 has been every bit as unlikely as his 2011-12, if not more so. And for the time being, he and the Caps have no choice but to ride it out, because what goes up must come down... and what's gone down, usually pops back up. Eventually.

Capitals vs. Hurricanes Recap: Peters Shuts Out Caps as Playoff Hopes Dim Further

[GameCenter - Ice Tracker - Game Summary - Event Summary - Shot Summary - Faceoff Summary - Play-by-Play - Home TOI - Visitor TOI - Fenwick/Corsi - Fenwick Timeline]

The first game of the second-half of a season - even a truncated season such as this one - is never going to be a "must-win" game in anything close to a literal sense of the word. But it sure can be a "hey, you guys really might want to win this one and most of the rest of 'em if you want to keep alive any post-season aspirations" game... even though that's not nearly as succinct or dramatic. And Tuesday night's game at Verizon Center was certainly one of those games.

Washington entered the night trailing visiting - and first place - Carolina by eight points in the Southeast Division with 120 minutes (or more) of hockey to be played between the two teams over a span of 51 hours or so this week, a span that would likely go a long way towards determining the Caps' regular-season fate. Win two games in regulation and they'd be four points back with 22 to play; lose both and the deficit would be an almost-certainly insurmountable ten or more.

But any athlete practiced in the art of the cliché knows that you can't be thinking that far ahead, instead focusing on winning the next period, the next shift, the next battle on the boards, and so on. On Tuesday night, the Caps fell behind early and couldn't recover, dropping a 4-0 decision as they continue to watch their post-season chances continue to fade.

Ten more notes on the game:

• Marcus Johansson was elevated to the top line with Mike Ribeiro and Alex Ovechkin during Sunday's loss to the Rangers and stayed up there for this one. It's a curious trio in that the three had pretty brutal puck-possession numbers entering the game (though, as we noted earlier today, that's obviously not the Holy Grail for Adam Oates when it comes to cobbling together his lineup). But Oates's hunch paid off immediately and Johansson got two tremendous scoring chances early... neither of which he could convert (including a slam-dunk on a Ribeiro feed). The chances, you like. The results, not so much.
  
• Just under four minutes into the first, the Caps had a defensive zone face-off against Carolina's top line. Oates sent out Nicklas Backstrom's line, and why not? Backstrom was an unreal 14-for-14 on Sunday against the Rangers and won five of seven draws from Eric Staal when these teams last played a couple of weeks back. But the best-laid plans of mice and men oft go astray, and this one did - Staal won the draw clean, Alexander Semin sent a shot high and wide (shocking, I know) and then a pinching Joe Corvo threw a puck towards the net from near the goal line that somehow deflected up high off Braden Holtby and in. It was a bad goal and a bad start, two things this Caps team could ill-afford on this night.
  
• The Caps had a chance to level the score on the power play mid-way through the period, but failed to get anything going with the extra man, which has become surprisingly common of late, as the once-torrid special teams unit was just 3-for-20 over the last half-dozen games coming into the game. Regression is a... well, you know. And so is having Mike Green on the shelf.
• The period would end with the Caps trailing by just that one goal, which wasn't too bad... until you realize that the Canes were a perfect five-for-five when leading after the first period this season.
  
• Carolina tilted the ice a bit more in the second period and were rewarded with a pair of Riley Nash goals, the second of which came after Jeff Schultz (and his superhuman reach) were out-touched on a would-be icing call by Patrick Dwyer, who fed Nash in front for the score. After two, the Caps trailed 3-0, were being out-shot at even-strength by a 25-16 margin, and were trailing in overall shot attempts 53-34. Oh, and Ovechkin was still looking for his first shot on goal of the game... and he'd never find it.
  
• Much has been made of the Caps' decimated blueline - one that, on this night, included Steve Oleksy and Cameron Schilling (making his NHL debut) in the third pair, and had a grand total of just 873 regular season games of service in the NHL (392 belonging to Jeff Schultz) and 553 in the AHL. But perhaps nothing hammers home how beat up the group is as the realization that Oleksy, who was playing his fifth NHL game was the old man of the group (at 27). Little NHL experience, little life experience... that's a tough way to go in this League.
  
• Oates reunited Backstrom and Ovechkin in the third period to try to find a spark, but there was none there. Still, perhaps it's time to give the duo another extended look together - with the season hanging on by a thread, maybe it's time to sink or swim with your franchise pair skating together.
  
• Oleksy fired up the crowd a bit when he fed Drayson Bowman his lunch in a third-period fight, so there's that... which ain't much.
  
• Carolina added a shorthanded empty-netter. Welp.
  
• The Caps failed to get a single puck past Justin Peters - the 'Canes third-string goalie and now have scored just three goals in the last three games after scoring 14 in the previous three. Part of that is bad puck luck, but a lot of it is bad hockey - the Caps have been brutally out-shot in two of the last three games and haven't out-shot an opponent in the last seven, outshot 242-176 over that span.

The song remains the same - the margin for error shrinks, the odds get longer and so on. But really, focusing on the Caps' playoff chances loses sight of the forest for the trees - that this simply isn't a good hockey team right now., and that face isn't being covered up by good fortune and mediocre opponents the way it was for an eleven-game stretch leading up to last weekend.

Game highlights:

Capitals-Hurricanes: Post-Game Quote Sheet

Via the team:

Washington Capitals head coach Adam Oates on the chemistry being off...

"I don't necessarily feel that way. I know the guys might be searching for answers for you guys after a game too and I understand that. If I thought a team was outplaying us drastically then I would say yeah, but I don't feel that way."

Washington Capitals head coach Adam Oates on what the team can improve on for Thursday's game...

"There are certain things we're going to want to do the same. Control the puck, obviously our execution can be better all the time...If I had said one thing to the guys after the first it was that we still turned it over a lot. We outplayed them, they didn't get a chance until the four-minute mark, but we still shot ourselves in the foot a few times where we could actually help ourselves even more."

Washington Capitals forward Matt Hendricks on the play of the team tonight...

"We had a lot of good scoring chances. Ovie [Alex Ovechkin] and Marcus [Johansson] and Ribs [Mike Ribero] came out and we had a lot of good movement in the beginning. We had some more in the second; [Troy] Brouwer got a shorthanded breakaway. We just couldn't find the net tonight."

Washington Capitals forward Eric Fehr on the play of Carolina...

"Their goalie played really well in the first period. We had some grade A opportunities and we didn't score. Same thing in the second, Brouwsey [Troy Brouwer] had a breakaway and a nice chance in front. [Their goalie] stones us, and we can't win the game."

Washington Capitals forward Eric Fehr on the road ahead...

"We were on a pretty good roll there and then we lose three in a row and we feel like we are right back to where we were. We've just go to work that much harder to get back in the division, and obviously it starts in two days against the same team. We've just got to find a way to score a goal early on them. They are a different team when they are coming from behind, and we couldn't expose that today."

Carolina Hurricanes head coach Kirk Muller on taking advantage of a banged-up Caps blue-line...

"We emphasized that we wanted to get pucks behind their [defense] tonight and go to work and play hard in their zone. I think our guys were smart with their puck placement tonight. I thought overall a strong game on the account of our goalie tonight."

Carolina Hurricanes head coach Kirk Muller on being able to maybe build some distance between them and the Caps...

"You can't take anything for granted. That was one of our strongest 60 minute performances this year and in a big game, that's great. We've done a really good job staying focused."

Carolina Hurricanes goalie Justin Peters on his effort tonight and the team in front of him ...

"It's a lot of fun just to get an opportunity to play in this league and every time I get an opportunity, I want to try and take advantage of it. We played an awesome game tonight as a team right from the drop of the puck, right to the last buzzer. That was a total group effort tonight and a huge confidence booster for us."

Carolina Hurricanes goalie Justin Peters on possibly being able to put the Caps away after Thursday...

"Obviously, you want to try and create space there [in the division] and we were focused on tonight, coming in here and trying to do that. We have to regroup now and try and have the same mindset coming into Thursday, trying to create space between us."

Carolina Hurricanes forward Riley Nash on how important these two games are for the division...

"We knew these two games were going to be pretty big games for us. Anytime you play a division rival, you want to put some distance between them. We go into every game hoping for two points, and working for two points, and that's our goal."

Carolina Hurricanes forward Riley Nash on goalie Justin Peters...

"He was unbelievable. He's had three, I think, really good starts for us now. Ever since [Cam] Ward went down, we really needed that."

Wednesday Caps Clips: Oh No Corvo

Your savory breakfast links:

• Recaps and other assorted musings on last night's loss from us (with quotes, and look for Clyde's pics later this morning), Vogs, Monumental video (Oates, players), NHL.com, AP, SportsXchange, WaPo (gamer, blog), WashTimes (gamer, blog), CSNW (gamer, blog, Joe B.), DCEx, Sick Unbelievable, Peerless, RMNB, DSP, Capitals Outsider and RtR, and with the view from The Triangle, our SB Nation partners over at Canes Country.
  • That loss was not fun - but admit it, the worst part was that the eventual game-winner was this "beauty" by Joe Corvo from Alexander Semin and Eric Staal. Blech. [Caps365, SBN]
  • The Caps took plenty of lumps in this one, but at least a few were given back by Steven Oleksy in this vicious beatdown of Drayson Bowman. [Caps Basketball, RMNB]
• Alex Ovechkin has taken plenty of criticism lately - some deserved, some not so much - and his coach has had enough of it. [Bog, CSNW, WaPo, WashTimes, SLAM]
• Besides, it's not just on Ovi's shoulders... there's plenty of blame to go around for the Caps' struggles. [WaPo (Wise)]
• It's a big week for the Caps, as these games are, for all intents and purposes, playoff games. Hey, and we didn't think we'd get to see any this year! [NHL.com, CBS Sports]
• Checking in on the walking wounded:
  • Brooks Laich took a self-proclaimed "huge step" by skating with the team yesterday morning and seemed rejuvenated by it. He's still a ways away, though... [WaPo, NBCW, CSNW, WashTimes (and again)]
  • ...as is Mike Green, who is still dealing with that groin injury we've been hearing so much about. [WaPo, WashTimes, CSNW]
• With Green out, John Erskine being placed on the IR and Tom Poti developing another mysterious upper-body ailment, it was time to spin the wheel o' defensemen. Cameron Schilling, come on down! ...er, up. Down? [Caps, Dump 'n Chase, WashTimes, WaPo, THW, DSP]
• Naturally the call-up of Schilling (not to mention Oleksy) coincides with what is going to be a pretty critical weekend for the Bears, as they continue to battle for a playoff spot. Sorry, guys. [PennLive]
• Finally, happy 51st birthday to Grant Martin and happy 44th to Kevin "Killer" Kaminski.

Wolski, Perreault and a Look Into Adam Oates's Thought Process

After going eleven games without a goal and ten without a point in a stretch that spanned nearly all of February, Wojtek Wolski was healthy-scratched for the Capitals' first game of March, an afternoon tilt in Winnipeg. When Troy Brouwer was too sick to play against Boston three nights later, Wolski drew back into the lineup and, as fate would have it, scored the game-tying goal late in the third period. Said Adam Oates post-game, "I'm obviously happy for him, but I thought he played a better hockey game. He did the things that we ask. The goal - that's obviously big for us and big for him. But we don't talk production. We talk play."

And so Wolski was back in the lineup again two nights later and notched a goal and a pair of assists in the Caps' romp over the Panthers, and his season seemed back on track... if it had ever really been off-track. As we noted between the Winnipeg scratch and the Boston game, "Wolski has had unfavorable zone starts, a solidly positive Corsi, the highest SFON/60 of any Caps forward... and unsustainably lousy puck luck. Keep playing this guy - the points will come." Sure enough, they did.

Then a funny thing happened after the team laid a collective egg on Long Island last Saturday - Wolski found himself back in the press box on Sunday, and he found another perhaps unlikely teammate up there alongside him in Mathieu Perreault. Oates was asked about these lineup decisions after that afternoon's loss to the Rangers, and the head coach responded, "Play. Play and the team we're playing. A lot of factors are involved."

Oates owes the questioner and the public no more than that, but one wonders what he saw in the play of the two that earned them the afternoon off. After all, the two forwards are among the team's top three in Corsi (a proxy for puck possession); Perreault leads all Caps forwards in assists- and points-per-sixty-minutes at five-on-five; Wolski leads the team in shots-for-per-sixty at fives (and is tops in shots-against among guys who have been here all year). And while Perreault has had great puck luck and Wolski hasn't, one-game-focused arguments based on either regression would seem rather silly. Perreault has taken too many penalties lately... but also has drawn a bunch. Heck, Perreault has even turned himself into a 54%-effective face-off man so far this season, 60% in the offensive zone. So if the scratches were about "play," it's hard to see how, unless there were specifics in that Islanders debacle that stood out to the coaching staff.

More: Capitals Ups and Downs: Week 8 Player Usage Chart: Caps Forwards Mathieu Perreault Shows That Crashing The Net Isn't Just For Big Guys

How about "the team we're playing"? The last time the Caps faced the Rangers, Perreault had the Caps' second-worst Corsi among forwards, and Wolski was almost as bad. Then again, the team was outshot 29-19 at even-strength. Perhaps something about the specific individual match-ups made Oates wary of throwing the two to the New York wolves again, but nine times out of ten a 17-plus-game sample is going to tell you more than one game can (and you'd certainly hope that Perreault's one point in seven career games against New York was treated as largely irrelevant).

In short, these are two guys who have helped the offense all year - with their play, if not always their production - watching in street clothes while Joey Crabb and Aaron Volpatti dressed, Matt Hendricks skated on the top line... and the Caps dropped a somewhat uninspired 4-1 decision. Whatever it is that Crabb and Volpatti bring to the lineup that Perreault and Wolski don't - some form of physicality that may or may not actually help a team win - it didn't seem to impact the final result (though, to be sure, the Caps had bigger problems on this day).

It's easy to second-guess a coach's decision in a loss. And, truth be told, decisions like the ones we're discussing here may seem a bit like picking out pillows for the deck chairs on the Titanic. But benching guys who are seeing 53% or so of all shots when they're on the ice heading towards the opposing net in favor of guys who are around 44% seems an odd play from afar. Adam Oates talks "play, not production" and takes into account "a lot of factors" when deciding upon his lineup; it'd be nice to know more about those factors, because puck possession, as commonly understood by statistically-inclined onlookers, doesn't appear to weigh too heavily among them.

George McPhee's Far-Reaching $1.2 Million

[Ed. Note: We're very excited to introduce the newest members of the Japers' Rink crew, Kevin Klein and Geoff Thompson from Sick, Unbelievable. Here's Kevin's first post... enjoy!]

I envy not the man who is called General Manager.

Every decision scrutinized and called into question by an arsenal of most accomplished couch GMs. Every personnel move - trades, signings, promotions or demotions - weighed for years in the eyes of the public, anything less than a championship inevitably bottle-necking to a single conclusion: failure.

A GM's body of work, on a micro level, is comprised of single transactions, which then make up the fabric of the teams he champions, like tesserae in a completed mosaic.

George McPhee, the artist of said mosaic, was faced with a notable decision to make this past offseason: re-sign Alexander Semin, or allow the high-scoring, seven-year Capital to plunge into the depths of free agency. McPhee opted for the latter, and we can only speculate as to what it would have taken to keep Semin here, as he ultimately inked a one-year deal with Carolina at a pricetag that gobbled up roughly 10% of their total cap space.

The nature of large groups of people (the fanbase of a professional hockey team, for instance) is that the majority identifies surface issues while allowing emotion or nostalgia to cloud judgment, without seeing further pertinent information that lay beyond view. To present an image, like deciding to eat the cake that's been in Tupperware in the fridge for a week without first lifting up the lid to see if it's gone moldy.

In this particular instance, under the Tupperware lid was Semin's massive salary and a gaping hole at second line center that the money in question could (and did) go towards filling.

Many came to grips with Semin's departure quickly - you didn't have to lift that lid up too far to establish that he probably wouldn't be in Washington this year - but McPhee's relatively minimal efforts to replace the talented winger stirred the pot of discontent. Eric Fehr and Wojtek Wolski - with careers pocked by injury, inconsistency, and an inability to meet expectations - could hardly fill the void created by the departure of a 40-goal scorer. Or could they?

Okay, no. But that doesn't mean they couldn't far exceed expectations. McPhee signed both wingers to one year, $600,000 contracts, making Fehr and Wolski the poster boys for what seemed to be the GMGM's offseason mantra: low risk, high reward.

It's worked. Fehr and Wolski have far outperformed their paygrade. Besides Fehr and Wolski, there are 44 players listed on CapGeek's NHL payrolls with salaries at $600,000 or less. 18 of these players have played in less than 5 games this season, and thus have not been included in the below table, which shows the total point production and Relative Corsi rating of each player.

It's worked. Fehr and Wolski have outperformed their paygrade.

That there are only 27 players in the league- less than one per team- that have played more than 5 games while making 600k or less is testament enough to the brand of hockey expected from them. This is plenty evident in the data forthcoming.

Relative Corsi is a quantification of how many shots are fired for as compared to shots fired against when a certain player is on the ice, as compared to when he is not on the ice. It's a good way to gauge a player's performance while sidestepping much of the luck and randomness prevalent in scoring. [All data was captured at end of games on Thursday, March 7, 2013. Subtle variance from this date is to be expected.]

Player	Total Points	Average Time on Ice/Game	Relative Corsi
John Scott (BUF)	0	3:57	-3.5
Kevin Porter (BUF)	0	15:22	-26.0
Eric Boulton (NYI)	0	4:58	-21.3
Pierre-Cedric Labrie (TBL)	0	6:42	-23.1
Brandon Bollig (CHI)	0	5:43	10.0
Patrick Bordeleau (COL)	1	5:14	2.2
Ryan Reaves (STL)	1	7:09	3.3
Aaron Volpatti (VAN/WSH)	1	7:00	-8.4
Dave Dziurzynski (OTT)	2	12:26	-3.7
Dustin Jeffrey (PIT)	2	10:54	9.7
Joe Vitale (PIT)	2	9:41	-21.6
Steve Begin (CGY)	2	7:36	0.7
Bobby Butler (NSH)	2	10:15	-1.9
Drayson Bowman (CAR)	3	11:48	-7.0
Mark Olver (COL)	3	9:25	-5.2
Cory Emmerton (DET)	3	10:31	-20.5
Rich Clune (NSH)	3	8:05	-0.2
Zac Rinaldo (PHI)	4	7:57	-13.7
Aaron Palushaj (COL)	4	12:19	-6.5
Jordan Nolan (LAK)	4	8:15	18.1
Ryan Garbutt (DAL)	5	9:22	-3.2
Stephen Gionta (NJ)	7	13:36	-15.9
Tom Pyatt (TB)	10	16:52	-13.9
Andrew Shaw (CHI)	10	15:10	3.7
Bryan Bickell (CHI)	12	12:21	0.6

The cumulative statistics yield the following averages:

	Points	Average Time on Ice/Game	Relative Corsi
League Average	3.24	9:41	-5.9

Let's see how Fehr and Wolski compare.

Capitals Player	Total Points	Average Time on Ice/Game	Relative Corsi
Eric Fehr	12	12:04	18.9
Wojtek Wolski	8	14:57	6.5

Eric Fehr has been particularly effective, putting up points at nearly four times the rate of other players at his paygrade. His Relative Corsi rating is almost exactly proportional, showing what Caps fans already know: he's playing well even when the puck isn't going in.

Though Wolski's numbers are not as impressive- and he's had a few highly visible blunders that have contributed to a (probably undeserved) notion that he's played poorly- these numbers show that he is exceeding expectations. That is, if salary can be considered a dictator of expectation...and when you're only making 600k, what other indicator could there really be?

More: Wolski, Perreault and a Look Into Adam Oates's Thought Process Capital Ups and Downs: Week 8

But it's possible that Fehr and Wolski are actually even higher above their class than these numbers indicate. The Chicago Blackhawks have started the season hotter than any other team in NHL history. 10, 11, even 12 games with points would have been one thing- but at 24 games in a row with a point, they are an absolute outlier...like Lebron James in high school degree of outlier, and their $600k and below skaters have not escaped the effects. They are listed below.

Brandon Bollig	0	10.0
Andrew Shaw	10	3.7
Bryan Bickell	12	0.6

As seen here, each player is dramatically above the average in either points or Relative Corsi. When their numbers are plucked from the equation, the league average looks more like this:

	Points	Relative Corsi
League Average minus Blackhawks	2.36	-6.7

Here again are Fehr and Wolski's numbers, for easy comparison:

	Points	Relative Corsi
Eric Fehr	12	18.9
Wojtek Wolski	8	6.5

George McPhee has essentially turned the yearly money that Alex Semin would have commanded into three contracts, all set to expire this year: Wolski and Fehr ($1.2 million combined), and Mike Ribeiro ($5 million). One of these players is playing well, and certainly exceeding expectations. Another of these players is playing very well, tied for most points at his paygrade and handedly outplaying the individual he is tied with as measured by Corsi. The third is presently among the league's elite in point accumulation. Not a bad haul, huh?

Granted, Fehr and Wolski both play above average minutes compared to their modestly moneyed fellows. As reasonably skilled offensively-minded forwards their strengths lay in different places than a Zac Rinaldo, or a Joe Vitale, but their ice time isn't so inflated that it discredits their superior play. In fact, as tweeted by Mike Vogel last week, Eric Fehr is doing more with his ice time than any other player of comparable production in the league.

If Fehr and Wolski continue driving play, it's unlikely McPhee lets them drift back out to free agency. That's the beauty of an inexpensive and short-term contract. Even with unexpected production from the player, the cost of the contract currently being played under sets a precedent for the next one, due to the short turnaround.

Point is, if McPhee believes that Fehr and Wolski's success is sustainable, he can likely get them back for very cheap (and with a number of concerns needing address- most notably a certain shutdown defenseman and a certain top 10 point getter in the league- a saved penny is a very good thing). Such are the fruits of two seeds planted by McPhee last offseason, in very ninja-like manner.