Confession time.
My mind is a lot like a hamster wheel with thoughts serving as hamsters. Last week, I was perusing one of the latest editions to the SBN Hockey family, Behind The Net when such a thought entered my hamster wheel and I decided to turn this into a weekly feature. Thanks to the Falconer for providing the impetus to this little pet projection of measuring the Stars penalty kill when a regular penalty killer takes a penalty versus a non-penalty killer.
On a side note, these guys have actually been around for years and are pioneers in the area of hockeymetrics. If you're a stats geek like me and haven't discovered them, now's a better time than never.
Obviously, I skipped a week because I wanted to have a reliable set of data from which to draw upon. Now that we're four games in, what conclusions can we draw?
Follow the jump
First, we need to identify who a regular penalty killer is. BTN has their own set of criteria:
So far, I ran this analysis for 2008-09 - I picked out every forward who played more than two minutes at 4-on-5 per game, played more than 70 games, and didn't change teams.
That works for top penalty killers, which is usually the top set of forwards and defensemen in each unit. I've decided to expand it a bit with no real hard criteria. Why? Well, Brenden Morrow had 1:02 of SH time Sunday night against Vancouver and 59 seconds against the Oilers on Tuesday. But against Nashville back on October 3rd and against Calgary on Friday night, he didn't get any penalty killing time.
So in my book, he's not a regular penalty killer. Now that doesn't necessarily mean for the purposes of this exercise that he'll remain a non-penalty killer. Obviously, I'll have to track his SH ice time, as well as every other skater, throughout the season to see if his role changes or not.
Also, you have to factor injuries into this project. In the opener on October 3rd, Mike Modano had 1:24 of SH ice time before he went out of the game late with a rib injury that has since sidelined him in the last three games. Obviously, somebody had to fill his role on the penalty kill and that person, according to ice time alone, appears to be Brad Richards, who logged a scant 36 seconds of SH ice time against Nasvhille but has since logged SH totals of 1:38, 2:00, and 1:09 in the last three games.
So for right now, my list of regular Stars penalty killers includes:
| Defensemen | Forwards |
|
Nicklas Grossman Stephane Robidas Trevor Daley Karlis Skrastins |
Toby Petersen Tom Wandell Steve Ott Brad Richards Mike Modano
|
And here's the data:
|
Not pretty, is it?
Granted, the Stars have been anything but stellar killing off penalties taken by non-PK'ers.
But if you take this data and use it in Brandon Worley's analysis from yesterday, you'll notice certain things jump out.
Such as, the absence of an overly physical defenseman on Ryan Kesler's goal where Trevor Daley failed to keep his man out of Marty Turco's line of sight.
That defenseman was sitting in the box at the time.