What We Learned: Capitals, Rangers and Metro Division drama

[jersey-xy]

It must be difficult to have just six regulation http://www.officialtimberwolvesshop.com/authentic-15-shabazz-muhamm... losses in 24 games and be second in your division, but such is life for the Rangers.

They have 34 points, the fourth-highest total in the league, and it's still not good enough. And what's crazy is that, just a week ago, they had a five-point cushion over Washington. It has been erased because the Capitals are winners of five straight, and the Rangers have lost three straight.

As a consequence, there is the requisite finger-pointing on Broadway that this thing or that is wrong with the team. They aren't as tough any more and guys take liberties — take, for example, Friday's matinee against Boston, in which Derek Stepan had his ribs broken on a hit so late it just happened as I typed this, and Brad Marchand routinely got into Henrik Lundqvist's kitchen to the point that his coach cried about it for two days after the fact — so you gotta recall Tanner f'n Glass from the minors. Maybe you try to slot Jarret Stoll back into a more prominent role because there's a lack of grit at the bottom of the lineup. Maybe Chris Kreider has just sucked.
What no one seems to be thinking in New York is, “Maybe this team just isn't that good.” There's all the winning in the last two years, sure, but you know what else there is? A whole lot of what appears at first glance to be luck.

On the chart below, you generally want to Willie Cauley-Stein Womens Jersey be in the middle on the Y-axis, and to the right on the X-axis. This indicates that your percentages are right about where you want them to be so as to generally keep them sustainable, and that you're dominating play even on a score-adjusted basis.
But you'll notice that the Rangers are well, well, well above everyone else, and pretty far to the left. They are, in fact, the third-worst possession team in the league (behind only Calgary and Colorado) but have the highest combined shooting and save percentage by 2.9 points (105.4 to 102.5).

The thing you have to keep in mind, though, is that teams with elite goaltending — which is obviously what Henrik Lundqvist, the world's greatest son, provides in spades — are always going to have high PDOs. From 2009-10 to present, the teams with the two highest PDOs are the Bruins (Tim Thomas/Tuukka Rask) and Rangers (Lundqvist). However, those league-leading numbers come in at 101 and 100.9, respectively, and while they're propped up entirely by the two best team save percentages over that time, one has to say that they're quite a bit lower than what the Rangers are doing now.

So even teams with the absolute very best goaltending tend to level out over time, and I think we can all agree that even if you're Henrik Lundqvist having the season of your life, a PDO starting with 105 — and it was 107.1 just a week ago — isn't built to last. The Rangers also have the league's highest shooting percentage even now, at 10.2 percent.

The Rangers losing a bunch of games was Roy Hibbert Womens Jersey therefore inevitable, and it also makes sense that people would start looking for excuses as to why the team couldn't save .961 at evens, and shoot 11 percent in perpetuity. They might want to start with the fact that those numbers were coming when the team had a score-adjusted CF% of 47.2 percent, which has since deteriorated even more.
This is the downside of everyone praising your team to the heavens for being able to do that for 20 games to start the year, after all. No one in the Rangers' room was saying, “Hey it's great that we're winning but our process is garbage and we have to fix it,” when they were rocking a plus-30 goal differential at 5-on-5. Lots of goals for and very few against — the Rangers led the league in both categories by wide margins as of Nov. 23 — make you feel invincible even if how you're getting those wins is, shall we say, “2013 Leafs”-esque.

So now in the last three games the team http://www.officialnuggetsshop.com/authentic-3-allen-iverson-jersey... has hit a rough patch, giving up 12 goals and scoring just four. The percentages have cratered. Harder than they should have, but those are the breaks. Watch any number of Rangers games this season, and the feeling is that they ought to be blowing leads like they did against Boston on Friday, but they don't, because Mats Zuccarello is having the 10-game stretch of his life, and Lundqvist is ever steady at the back to mop up any of the myriad mistakes the slipshod defense in front of him makes.