Penalty-kill problems dog Canucks
Improving in this one area could be the key to a successful season, but doing so is harder than it looks
There is nothing wrong with the Canucks’ penalty killing some coaching couldn’t fix.
That’s what Travis Green is hoping, anyway. Good luck. The Canucks’ troubling little secret is their short-handed special teams department wasn’t good even when Brandon Sutter and Bo Horvat were healthy — this year or last.
Until Sutter’s midsection was ripped up during a hit on Nov. 24, the Canucks were 22nd in the league with a penalty-killing unit which was successful 78.3 per cent of the time.
Since, the Canucks have been marginally worse, slotting in at 24th in the NHL with a 75.9 per cent success rate.
None of this bodes well for the second half of the season. The Canucks are looking to avoid last year’s experience, and that experience was a total implosion.
In Willie Desjardins’ final 41 games in command, his Canucks team went 10-25-6. That slide led to Desjardins’ firing. Who knows what something similar would mean for this franchise this year.
The hope is obvious. Sutter and Horvat return healthy in the next few weeks. The team is stabilized. The good vibes from earlier in the season are recaptured.
The season ends on an uptick. Everyone waits anxiously in the summer for the start of the Elias Pettersson era.
It’s a fine dream. But somehow, some way, for it to work, the coaching staff is going to have to fix the penalty kill.
“There’s been a lot of work done by our group,” Green said. “Lots of teaching. There are some learned parts of penalty killing that just take time. It’s a feel for the game. It’s a feel for the league. It’s a feel for plays a player can make within the league.
“Guys can play a long time if they learn to be a good penalty-killing forward.”
In other words, it’s harder than it looks.
Before Saturday’s game, only the Edmonton Oilers and New York Islanders had given up more power-play goals this season.
It’s interesting that both the Oilers (fifth) and the Canucks (seventh) were among the best teams in the league in terms of suppressing shot attempts in PK situations.
The Canucks are giving up 96.76 shot attempts per hour, and most teams are well over 100. They’ve also been limiting scoring chances to 54-per-hour, which is among the top-10 fewest in the NHL.
So there is hope.
To fulfil that hope, however, the goaltending is going to need to be better. Short-handed, the Canucks have the third-worst save percentage in the league.
Horvat and Sutter can make a difference. But they can’t make Jacob Markstrom and Anders Nilsson better goalies. That will depend more on their coach Dan Cloutier.
It was interesting to hear Green answer a question about who has stepped up in Horvat’s absence.
“I like the way (Nic) Dowd has progressed down the middle,” Green said. “But those are not shoes that anyone fills. He’s a big part of our team. Between him and Sutter, I read it somewhere that they take 75-80 per cent of our D-zone faceoffs. That’s a little detail, but that’s still a big part of your game.
“Both guys penalty kill, and we’ve had to have other guys step up and learn to kill on the fly probably more than they otherwise would have.”
Green, it’s believed, had a lot of influence in the Dowd acquisition. And since a rough first couple of games with the Canucks, he’s be fine.
Dowd has helped control nearly 50 per cent of shot attempts in his past eight games. But it doesn’t reflect well on some of the highpriced talent that Dowd is the first player that comes to mind when the coach is asked who has stepped up in the past month.
That can’t be the answer in a few months if Green is asked who stepped up in the second half of the season.
If it is, I don’t like their chances in avoiding another late-season slide to the bottom of the league standings.