Penalty-kill unit finds its stride
Players finally excelling at aggressive approach when short-handed
With every game the Washington Capitals’ new-look penalty kill allowed a goal — and there was at least one in15 of the team’s first 20 games — coach Todd Reirden’s belief in his own change was tested. He hadn’t changed much going into his first season in charge, but the Capitals’ shorthanded philosophy was where he chose to make his mark along with new assistant coach Scott Arniel. They expected growing pains, but as the unit struggled through the first quarter of the season, sticking to the moreaggressive approach took quite a bit of faith.
“At the beginning of the year, it was us frustrated with things not being on point,” center Lars Eller said. “Lately, we’ve been doing a good job of frustrating teams.”
After the Capitals started the season with the third-worst penalty kill in the league, they’ve seemingly turned a corner, not allowing a power-play goal in the past 13 times shorthanded and perfect through four games. The return of forward Tom Wilson, who was suspended for the first 16 games, has helped the unit, but Washington also seems to have finally gotten on the same page about when to pressure power plays in the new system. Not coincidentally, the Capitals are riding a six-game winning streak entering Friday’s game against the New Jersey Devils even as the team has been without two top players in Evgeny Kuznetsov and T.J. Oshie, who both have concussions.
“We’re starting to get a little more comfortable with some of the adjustments we made from last year to this year,” Reirden said. “Weknewwewere on the cusp of doing some good things and were kind of ending up on the wrong side of some bounces and some plays ending up in our net. It’s still not perfect by any means, but at least we’re headed in the right direction.”
Going into this season, Reirden and Arniel decided to use more of the team’s skilled forwards on the penalty kill, and the idea was that those players, typically good on their skates and with their sticks, could take away time and space from the opposition, perhaps not allowing power plays to even get set up in Washington’s zone. That would then keep Capitals players from having to block high-speed slap shots, and it would also help balance the ice time with morefresh legs on the penalty kill.
“I know that they won the Cup and it worked, but at the end of the day, we just felt as a staff that we could use our skill a little bit more,” Arniel said. “That’s pressure down ice, that’s being tough in the neutral zone and not allowing entries. We had done a pretty good job in most of the first 15 games of being aggressive down ice and denying easy entries. It was the in-zone stuff that we were trying to get out of the players.
“Every player, if you’ve played one system for a while, your tendency is to sort of fall back to that, and the one thing you cannot do on a penalty kill is if one guy does one thing and somebody else does the opposite. I think we had a little bit of that.”
The Capitals had a middle-of-thepack penalty kill last season, ranked 15th with an 80.3 percentage, during the regular season, and it allowed 18 power-play goals on 75 times shorthanded during the playoffs. Teams typically focus on limiting anything coming through the middle of the ice, which often means a penalty-killing forward is posted in that area. But Washington is asking its forwards to push down the walls and keep the action to the corners and away from the top of the power play, where shooters can often get off a slap shot and then create chaos at the front of the net with rebound opportunities.
“Because I play power play, it’s a lot tougher for the power-play guys when you get some pressure on you and make it hard for yourself out there,” center Nicklas Backstrom said.
“For the forwards, the tandem works a little bit different depending on who has the puck,” Eller said. “Last year, for example, the guy who would be in the middle, depending on how [the power play] would move the puck, he could really end up standing still for 30 seconds at a time and the other guy would be doing all of the skating. Now it’s a little bit more that if they move it from east to west or up and over, now we’re switching and there’s always movement back and forth. It’s a little bit more shared.”
Washington’s underlying metrics reinforced that the penalty kill would eventually rebound. Eller said coaches pulled statistics that they keep — time in zone, clears, chances against and others - and those all reflected favorably on the team. It was a few unfortunate bounces that were hurting the Capitals, along with the natural adjustment period to a new system.
“Are you giving up high-danger opportunities every time you go on the ice? It’s the one thing wehaven’t done,” Arniel said. “We’ve kept that number down and we’ve really limited the second chances, which is a big part of penalty-killing as well. The underlying stats may say you’re doing a good job, but if you’re getting scored on, it’s still not good enough. It’s been a work in progress, and there’s still a lot of hockey to play here. Teams will, after the 20-game mark, kind of define themselves in all different areas, and that’s kind of what we’re hoping with our penalty kill.”