Grading Tom Wilson’s seventh season with the Washington Capitals.
Tom Wilson has turned from a physical fourth line player to a reliable first line winger who puts up the goals and points. After turning in career high numbers in 2018-19 he was on pace to clearly beat those career best numbers. When the season got stopped Wilson had already set a career high 44 points and was just two goals away from setting a new career high there as well.
However, when watching Wilson this past season I remembered feeling like I wanted more. That wasn’t exclusive to him, the entire team went through big stretches of that. While he scored 21 goals just 9 of them were 5v5 goals. He had 5 power play goals and added another 3 goals on empty nets.
Compare his goal scoring to the previous year where he scored 22 goals. Over 68% of those goals in 2018-19 came at 5v5 where he scored 15 of his 22 at 5v5. This past season only 42% of his goals came at 5v5. His lack of 5v5 production has to bring his grade down.
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His advanced numbers did go up this season though. His shot attempts percentage was a solid 50.77% and his scoring chance percentage was 51.7%. His high danger attempts percentage was 51.12%. His numbers the previous season were 48.93%, 46% and 43.40% respectively.
Again, goal scoring has to bring his grade down a bit here, in 2018-19 Wilson was +8 in 5v5 goals. This season he was -10 when on the ice while 5v5.
Wilson did have chances though, despite the goal scoring being down. This season he had 118 individual scoring chances and 67 high danger attempts. Both of those are up from the previous season where he had 110 scoring chances and 56 high danger attempts.
The shooting percentage is where you see the big decline. For whatever reason Wilson took a dive in this category. When setting a career high in goals the previous year Wilson was shooting at 14.71% while 5v5. This season it went all the way down to 8.49%.
That is actually a pretty promising thing to see if you ask me. If Wilson can keep up his power play performance, add some empty netters and bring up his shooting percentage he could crack 30 goals in a season.
Wilson of course is known for hitting. He led the team in hits this season with 232. Garnet Hathaway was the closest guy in this stat with 184. Wilson was second in hits the previous year with 180, trailing only Ovechkin’s 204. You can see Wilson was definitely more physical this season.
If you want to talk about playoffs, I’m not sure his grade will rise much. Not many Capitals had a good playoffs, the majority of the team failed to show up. Wilson had just one goal and three points in the playoffs while being a -5. Not much to talk about when talking about the Caps in the playoffs.
Wilson was about to have a career year before the pandemic shut down the rest of the NHL season. He was setting career highs with every point he scored and was just two goals away from a new career high there as well. He improved a lot of his individual numbers too. If Wilson didn’t have a down season scoring 5v5 I would say this is an easy A. But having so many long stretches of failing to score 5v5 that brings his grade down to a solid B. A good season from Wilson, but still some room to improve.