When a Win is Not a Win--"Non-Repeatable Skill"

Last night the Washington Capitals defeated the Detroit Red Wings by a score of 3-1.  By way of a quick recap, you can see my pals at Stars and Sticks for a very good one. 

But what is a win if not a win by way of advanced stats?  Is it still a win? (Spoiler: yes...it is still a win).  The fine fellas at Russian Machine Never Breaks had this one called early.  The line combos hadn't changed from Philadelphia and that was, in their words, "ridiculous".  These are nearly the same lines that merely received a loser point to Philadelphia, after all, on the tail end of a back to back on the road.  But it doesn't matter that they stole a point in that game regardless and that they were tired and noticeably fatigued because Corsi, of course!  Incidentally, the same blog that's been clambering for Andre Burakovsky to get more ice time is now upset that he's on the top line, where he'll inevitably get, you guessed it, MOAR ICE TIME! (Note: The use of the word "MOAR" is an RMNB staple...when in Rome).  I asked them about the "ridiculous" comment on Twitter:

Oh.  Ok. "The hotness is over". Call off the parade, guys.

So basically, by their logic the last few games have "hinted that changes are needed".  The Capitals' record over the last few games must've been horrible, right?  Wrong.  Going back to December 27th, the last 7 games, the Capitals are 5-0-2. Their two OT losses were to a strong Islanders team, and of course the aformentioned Philadelphia game, the second of a back to back on the road.  In their recap, Russian Machine (not to continue to pick on these guys, but they were the most vocal opponents of last night's victory, which seems like a really strange thing to say, doesn't it?) was especially apocalyptic about this victory.  They wrote:

How did the Capitals score three goals with so little offense? That’s not a rhetorical question: the answer is luck. Or, if you wanna be a little more exacting, the answer is a non-repeatable skill.
The Caps are gonna have to right the ship when it comes to shot differential. They’ve got a couple lines that are dysfunctional and their best D-pairing no longer tilting the ice as it should. They can’t bank on wins like this one for too much longer.

 "Non-repeatable skill" and "luck" are two ways of saying that their PDO is much too high.  PDO is a statistic that combines save % and shooting % in an effort to measure overall performance of a team and highlight teams with outsized "luck".  Oddly, if we take a look at the Capitals overall PDO this season, they are 6th, only slightly above the Chicago Blackhawks (10th), and under the New York Rangers (1st), Pittsburgh Penguins (4th), and Nashville Predators (5th), all considered superior teams in their respective divisions. 

The idea, as noted in the link above, "is that teams on average should be around the 1.000 level as each shot is either a goal or a save teams that are relatively higher are producing above expectations and should regress back to the 1.000 level and teams that are relatively lower are producing below expectations and should regress up to the 1.000 level." The Capitals are at 1.014.  Not too shabby.

So maybe it's not all luck and maybe the Corsi and Fenwick stats aren't telling the whole story (by now you've surely caught my running theme on this blog).  Last night, I revisited a piece I really enjoyed by Daniel Wagner from The Score. This bit in particular resonated with me:

It’s not enough to simply outshoot your opponent: every NHL team knows this. It’s why you’ll never see players trying to game their Corsi by taking low-quality chances. What matters is goals and you score goals by doing things that hockey traditionalists love — making a good first pass out of the defensive zone, winning puck battles, creating turnovers in the neutral zone, going hard to the net, cycling the puck down low, etc.

Corsi by it's very nature a shot-measurement analysis tool.  The more shots your team takes, and the less the other teams take, the better success you will *likely* have.  But as Wagner notes, sometimes there are other things at play that result in a win (those he listed above).  These are important elements, and they are by and large coachable elements. An advanced statistician sitting in his cubicle up at Kettler Iceplex or at the Verizon Center on game day can't tell a team how to do these things. 

The great Tommy Lasorda said, “No matter how good you are, you're going to lose one-third of your games. No matter how bad you are you're going to win one-third of your games. It's the other third that makes the difference.” This win, and perhaps others like it, are part of the "other third".  And winning them surely does make a difference.