Today in Caps Clips, J.P. announced the start of the Japers' Rink Penalty Tracker. I, among others, suggested it would be interesting to see the penalties broken down by the zones in which they occur. I decided to put my money where my mouth is, so I did the research myself using NHL.com's Full Play-By-Play game reports. The following table includes penalties broken down into offensive, defensive, and neutral zones. The table does include fights but does not include too-many-men penalties. Here are my results:

When analyzing these results, all "Small sample size" and "Correlation does not mean causation" disclaimers apply.

Obviously, one would expect defensemen to take more penalties in the defensive zone and forwards to take more penalties in the offensive zone. This holds true here. So far, defensemen have taken only two penalties in the offensive zone, and Green committed both of them. This makes sense due to his propensity to jump in on the rush, but it is impressive that no other defenseman has taken an offensive zone penalty yet. Forwards have not been nearly as clean in the opposite end, however. Sloppy backchecking, perhaps? Caught out of position and forced to commit a foul in order prevent a scoring opportunity? It is probably too early to tell, but it is interesting nonetheless. Also interesting is that the team as a whole have committed more penalties in the defensive zone than the offensive.

The season is young, so there is not too much to take away from this table yet. If anyone finds this interesting, I am willing to maintain it throughout the season. What do you guys think?