On Penalty Kill Rankings

As promised, (and just in time for the post lunch slacking) I've compiled similar statistics for penalty kills as I did for power plays (note: the PP statistics will be be updated to include games through 10/26 soon).

Again, the idea is that keeping track of mere occurrences is a fairly coarse metric of penalty killing efficiencies (PK%).  Instead, I determine rankings by the number of goals against per 2 minute short handed situation (PK G/2; thanks F&B!).  I argue that this is a better metric because if two teams both allow goals on every power play, but one allows them in the first 30 seconds and the other in the last 30 seconds, the second team should have a higher ranking, even if the end result is the same.  Also, teams get more credit for killing 5 minute majors in my system, as a full kill essentially counts as 2.5 kills, while under the old system it only counts as 1.  Likewise, for my whipping boy play, the 9 minute PP the Caps had vs Calgary last year gave the Flames a perfect 3/3 for killing 7 minutes of penalties.  That is the same 3/3 they would have had if the Caps remained ineffective and Nylander had not taken a minor.  In my system they effectively killed 3.5 penalties in the game situation.  They would have had 4.5 had the Caps not evened up the teams.

When looking at the numbers from the 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 seasons, we see that the old metric (PK/G (NHL)) tends to overestimate the number of short handed situations before a goal is given up (PK/G) by around 1.  For teams with better PK units it overestimates by far more than one.  I have included the number of goals allowed per 60 minutes of short handed time as well (PK G/60) because, while it is a mere scaling of PK G/2, I find it more readable.

For comparison to a rather well understood season, here are the data for 2008-2009:

The data through October 26, 2009 for the 2009-2010 season is here:

In this data we see that while Ottawa has the highest ranked power play in the old metric, Minnesota is truely the dominant team.  And boy are they good.  Their penalty kills last a full 7 seconds longer, on average, than the next closest team, 14 seconds longer than the average, and 25 seconds (almost 1/4 of a PP) longer than the worst.  Additionally, while the old metric shows that they actually would allow a goal 30 seconds earlier than Ottawa, we see that they would actually last more than 30 seconds longer.  We also see how bad they Leafs penalty kill really is.  The Leafs are allowing goals at a rate of slightly less than 1 for every 2 full penalty kills.

As for the Caps (this being a Caps blog and me being a Caps fan, after all), they aren't too shabby given the relative lack of discipline.  They don't take a hard hit in the new metric (unlike the new power play metric).

I'll be updateing these stats as the season progresses.  When grad school gets out of the way for a few hours I will post everything on an external site, rather than cluttering fan posts with updates.

Next in the series will be a look at 5v3, 5v4, and 4v4 situations.