Penalty kill?
Not for the Edmonton Oilers. The kill is dead.
As in dead last in the league.
Buried.
Dust.
Perhaps the furious fall that’s been on display all season long wouldn’t be so noticeable if it weren’t for the height from where it originated.
The Oilers’ penalty kill units shut the door in last year’s playoffs, allowing just four goals in 70 chances for a league-leading 94.3 per cent — up from the 79.5 per cent they ended the regular season with in the middle of the pack.
But this year has been an entirely different story.
Heading into Tuesday’s game against the visiting Carolina Hurricanes, the Oilers were barely treading water, hovering right around the 50 per-cent mark after allowing nine goals in 20 attempts to sit 32nd out of 32.
“I think our penalty kill right now is — I know it is — dead last,” Oilers head coach Kris Knoblauch said following Tuesday’s morning skate at Rogers Place. “But on the analytics side of it, we are somewhere in the middle, and that’s probably where we should be.
“But a lot of room for improvement, and that’s for our defence with clears, our forwards breaking up more plays, especially on the forecheck. The goalies making more saves. A lot of things, collectively, we can get a little bit better at everywhere.”
If you wanted him to be able to pinpoint one underlying cause for the most extreme of swings a penalty kill can make, just know that the wound inflicted feels more like a shotgun blast than a sniper’s bullet.
“I think it’s been a little bit of everything,” Knoblauch said. “I think we’ve been a little bit slow. I think we’ve been getting used to each other, who’s been out there.
“I don’t think we’ve had as many saves as we did in the playoffs.”
Not only was the penalty kill keeping pucks out of their net during that near-miraculous post-season run, but the Oilers managed to put a puck in the opposition’s while shorthanded in back-to-back games to help crawl back from an 0-3 series deficit to the Florida Panthers in the Stanley Cup Final.
The Oilers penalty kill went from looking like it could do no wrong to now making all the wrong moves.
The hunter has now become the prey.
And for a team losing more and more confidence with each passing game, mistakes made out on the ice are being punished first by a trip to the penalty box, and then magnified on the scoreboard almost every other time.
It doesn’t exactly make for a formula for success for a team looking to balance high expectations on the season with some successful results early on.
“We definitely aren’t killing at the clip we feel like we’re capable of killing at,” said defenceman Darnell Nurse. “With that, I remember last year we went through a stretch where it was kind of like we were building our penalty kill and building a lot of those core foundation steps that made us successful in the playoffs.
“And I think, in a lot of sense, we’re looking at our kill right now and there are some areas where we’re out there killing on our toes and being instinctual, and we’re doing some really good things but the puck is going into the net.”
Of the first 24 goals the Oilers surrendered on the season, more than one-third of them (37.5 per cent) came on opposing power plays.
The Oilers’ own power play hasn’t exactly been contributing to the cause either, having scored just once in 15 tries prior to facing Carolina. That’s a 6.7 per cent success rate to sit 30th out of 32 teams.
While getting some goals back on special teams would certainly help stop the bleeding, improvements on the penalty kill would help avoid those wounds in the first place.
“So, we’ve got to find ways to clean up those big chances that we’re giving,” Nurse said. “But there’s also an element of us as a PK, we take such pride in it. If you talk to any guy who kills a penalty in our group, it’s one of the things we really take pride in.
“So, we’re building that foundation and don’t want to get discouraged because you don’t want to get slow and then back up. For us, when we’re aggressive we’re at our best.”
E-mail: [email protected]
On Twitter: @GerryModdejonge
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