Penalty kill bound to miss Sutter
Latest hockey data proof injured veteran centre an ace in short-handed play
PATRICK JOHNSTON
Brandon Sutter was once billed by his general manager as a potential elite, two-way centre.
He has not panned out that way, but there’s no denying his abilities as a penalty killer and that his influence on the Canucks’ penalty kill, which is sitting ninth in the NHL, can’t be understated.
There’s a catalogue of numbers that back up the important role Sutter plays on the team’s work when down a man, and about how hard it will be to fill in for him while he recovers from a separated shoulder over the next month or so.
The easiest one to look at is how many goals have been scored against the Canucks when he’s been killing penalties this season: Just one goal in almost 45 minutes of shorthanded duty, spread over 13 games.
In publicly available data from NaturalStatTrick.com, Sutter has the second stingiest shot-attempts-against rate of any forward while the Canucks are killing a penalty, just behind Markus Granlund. He has the lowest rate of shots-onnet-against of any Canuck who is regularly killing penalties.
When Sutter is killing penalties, he’s second stingiest in the rate of allowing scoring chances against — in other words, shots from the area bounded by the tops of the faceoff circle, down through the faceoff dots and in toward the crease — just behind, again, Granlund.
Sutter has also been the team’s primary faceoff man when short-handed, winning 45.5 per cent of his draws, well above Bo Horvat (37.5 per cent) and Jay Beagle (31.2 per cent).
Offline, there’s more interesting data to consider. Local hockey writer Harman Dayal has written about the importance of understanding micro stats, the little numbers that require intense tracking and help us understand the bigger numbers like the ones above.
“Intuitive,” he has called these numbers.
Thankfully, they make total sense from first glance. They tell us things that we understand right away, like how much Sutter is able to disrupt what the other team is trying to do with the puck.
(The numbers Dayal’s tracking, by the way, are the sort of thing that would be great to see more of. Hockey is a very complex game. There are still many principles and skills — Sutter’s backchecking and pressure on defencemen at even strength are another that would be fascinating to learn more about in terms of significance — that need further examination.)
Sutter leads the Canucks in clearing the puck while down a man, is the best forward on the Canucks at breaking up plays and then retrieving the puck, plus when he’s on the ice he’s cutting in half the rate at which the opposition is connecting on passes into the high-danger shot area on top of the crease.
This ability to break up the opposition’s efforts to make plays lines up very well with the public comments his coach made earlier this year about what the penalty kill needs to be better at : preventing passes across the ice.
The challenge is how to replace Sutter. Beagle, if he weren’t hurt, would be the obvious choice by reputation, though the data suggests his work last year in Washington wasn’t elite.
The next-up guy will obviously be Granlund, who hasn’t been terribly proficient on faceoffs this year (he’s just over 40 per cent in all situations; he’s taken just three draws short-handed) but his numbers after the faceoff, you’ll have noted above, are solid.
Tyler Motte has proven to be a good partner to Sutter, but will he carry on with Granlund? Tim Schaller has been the other primary winger when down a man, so he’s an option as well.
Dayal’s data tells us that the first unit on the penalty kill, led by Sutter, has been far better than the second. That the Canucks’ goalies are posting a 96.2 per cent save percentage with Sutter on the penalty kill — the second unit is about 15 points lower — and that figure is quite possibly related in part to the fact Sutter’s group is doing such a good job at disrupting opposition possessions.
The task while he’s out is for his teammates to learn his lessons and apply them.