Canucks penalty kill has been the bright spot of preseason
The Vancouver Canucks are doing a good job at killing penalties. Sure, it’s only been five preseason games, but that is not a sentence that would have even seemed conceivable last season.
The Canucks have gone 13-for-15 over their last four games, killing 86.6% of all opportunities. That doesn’t include their first game against the Calgary Flames when the Canucks iced an overmatched roster against the Flames’ NHL regulars. Even with that 10-0 drubbing included in the sample, the Canucks are still killing more than 80% of penalties across the entire preseason.
The fact that the Canucks are managing to look at least OK after taking a penalty is a massive improvement from last season.
The Canucks performance when down a man was one of the dominant news stories of their 2022-23 NHL season. The unit was so bad that it looked as if they would set the record for the worst ever until they improved slightly in early spring.
Fixing the team’s penalty kill was clearly high on the list of priorities this past offseason. Almost all of the significant additions, most notably Teddy Blueger, Ian Cole, and Carson Soucy, have extensive experience and strong reputations as good options when shorthanded. As a result, this year’s units should look drastically different compared to the last.
Blueger spent more than two minutes per game on the penalty kill last season and won 52% of his faceoffs in all situations. He will be one of the first forwards to hop over the boards when down a man.
Cole was the most frequent penalty killer for the Tampa Bay Lightning last season and will be relied upon similarly on the other side of the continent now that he’s with the Canucks.
Head coach Rick Tocchet pleased with penalty kill progress
After Wednesday night’s 2-1 loss to the Seattle Kraken, the Canucks play on the penalty kill was actually one of the positive takeaways that Tocchet praised.
“[The] penalty kill was good. The penalty kill in the last three or four games has been really good,” Tocchet told the media after the game on Wednesday night. “That’s one good thing, but we’re on the wrong side of the penalties all the time, so we got to clean that up.”
While the Canucks did allow a power play goal, it was the result of some bad luck, as Filip Hronek’s attempt to clear the puck deflected off of a broken stick.
Poturalski POTS one! šØ
Just after a power play had ended, Filip Hronek inexplicably hands it over to Poturalski in a prime scoring area.
1-0 #SeaKraken pic.twitter.com/VaZmlRXdIJ
— Sound Of Hockey (@sound_hockey) October 5, 2023
Overall, the unit has looked much better through the first five preseason games. Their success rate over these past few games would have landed them in the top 10 of last year’s rankings. Of course, that won’t mean much when the Canucks start this year’s regular season.
The Canucks open their season with two games against the Edmonton Oilers. The Oilers led the NHL with a 32.36% power play success rate last season, almost six percentage points better than the second-place Toronto Maple Leafs. In the postseason, the Oilers scored on a whopping 18 of their 39 attempts, good for 46.15%.
This means the Canucks will get no warm-up before they face a tough test against one of the best power-play units in NHL history. We will see if Tocchet is still happy with the penalty kill after those first two games.
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