The unrestricted free-agency period is a great opportunity for teams to quickly fill their holes.
For those looking to repair and/or upgrade their penalty kill, who are the most effective available options?
As usual, I'll be using analytics to answer this question—which is never easy when measuring the defensive side of a player's contributions. Essentially we're looking for players who handled the lion's share of a team's penalty killing duties while reducing the number of scoring opportunities their opponents were allowed.
Because the 300 minutes killing penalties per season that even a top player spends is far too small a sample size on which to base the results, this analysis went back three years.
And because no one single statistic can provide a clear picture, several different analytic perspectives were used, including:
The percentage of the team's shorthanded minutes assigned
The average level of competition that player faced (i.e. top power-play unit or secondary)
The team's goals against average with that player on the ice and without
The attempted shots the team allowed with that player on ...
Read Full Article at Bleacher Report - NHL
Article written by Rob Vollman
Ranking the Best Penalty Killers Among 2014 NHL Free Agents
June 28th, 2014 by Rob Vollman Leave a reply »
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