Arrggh. Got scooped by my blogmate! I've been looking at the Flames PK but I've been struggling with how to present it in a bloggily delicious way. Just jumping onto MG's coattails (like Aucoin on a PP! -ed) though, might just be the best way.
MG's post pretty much nailed the saints and sinners on the PK, with some exceptions that I'll go into. but first some of the ugly truthiness:
Calgary PK efficiency was 81.5% ranked 20th in the league, but 12th out of 15 in the Western Conference. Of those 3 teams in the WC that had a worse PK rate all of them allowed fewer PP goals.
Calgary allowed 72 PP goals, ranked 27th in the league, 15th out of 15 in the conference. San Jose (who we eventually met in the playoffs) were the best allowing only 44 PP goals, a 28 goal difference.
Big part of the problem, if not the biggest: Flames take too many penalties, Calgary was 29th in the league, times shorthanded. Anaheim was the only team worse.
Calgary was significantly worse on the road, which I guess isn't a huge surprise, allowing 42 PP goals on the road and 30 at home.
Calgary's record when allowing at least one PP goal: (W-L-OTL) 20-26-5
Calgary's record when allowing at least two PP goals: 5-10-2
Calgary's record when not allowing any PP goals: 22-4-5
Now, I'm sure most teams will have a favorable record in games where they don't allow PP goals, much like going into the third period with a lead, but DAMN, that record looks good.
I think the Flames went through a couple of phases on the PK last year:
The first phase, they tried to play the diamond, but got beat down low a lot. This goal is representative of early season PP goals against the Flames. (click on the little camera icon beside Brunette's PPG in the summary). Its basically scored on a cross crease pass and either goes in off of a Flame, or the Flame defenceman can't handle the opposition down low. The Flames tried to play guys like Aucoin, Smith, Yelle and got killed. By the end of November Aucoin seems to be off of the PK, Smith disappears and Yelle plays better but still not great. During this phase (Oct, Nov) we're getting scored on by guys like; Naslund, Sedin, Zetterberg, Radulov, Brunette, Kopitar, Bernier, Parrish, Gaborik, Nilsson, Holmstrom, Perry.
The second phase, the Flames try and take away the low chances, but still watch the points, it looks like they're more in a box formation. But they're a little more stretched out and the typical goals of this phase look like this one from Evgeni Malkin. To much time and ice in the middle of the zone allows Malkin to walk in from about the face dot level. This phase is December and the first few games of January. Malkin, St Louis, Richards are the kinds of guys scoring against us in this phase; not really the power/stand in front of the net guys, but the more talented mobile guys.
The next phase the Flames collapse even more to take away the down low chances and the midzone chances and, of course, this opens up the points. Derek Morris' goal here is representitive of this phase, basically mid January to the end of the year. This phase we're giving up goals to guys like: Niedermayer, Koistinen, Burns, Foster, Staios, Morris, Norstrom, Leopold. We had been giving up very few goals to the point men in previous phases but they were significant scorers during the last part of the year.
The Flames did play better as the year progressed and some of it, as seen above, is just finding out which method, combined with which personnel, go best together. I'm sure a lot of it, is picking your poison and who you're going to NOT let beat you. That, by design, is going to give more opportunities elsewhere. By the end the Flames had decided on their best PK team: Sarich and Regehr at defence and then a rotation of Conroy, Lombardi and Nolan up front. Phaneuf and Ericsson became the 2nd unit D and Aucoin didn't play much after the beginning of the year. Iginla got some PK time early in the year, but it looked like Keenan kept Iggy's, Langkow, and Juice for the 'shift after the penalty', and didn't load them up with any significant PK time.
Goal
Your best Penalty Killer is your goaltender, or so the conventional wisdom goes. How was Kipper as a PK member? Well like his team, he struggled early, and played better as the season went on, but not really good enough to erase all the early season damage. Kiprusoff's EV SV% of .925 is middle of the pack for the NW division but his PK SV% of .875 was easily the worst, and the delta (the difference between EV and PK) was the highest in the div. Why did Kipper struggle on the PK? Don't know, he's a notoriously slow starter and that fed into the Flames bad PK start. Is he as quick as he used to be? He appears to get beaten more from the top of the circle than he used to, is that because he's playing too deep, are his reflexes slowing, is he in optimum condition? Does Keenan/Sutter play Kipper too much? Maybe just throw that one out for discussion.
Defence
MG lays out the numbers that show that Vandermeer would've been our best PKer, but that's with Brodeur's .897 PK SV%. Regehr and Sarich were steady, but the surprise for me was Ericsson. At evens he's a train wreck, but he's not bad on the PK. It looked like he was basically forced into the role because Aucoin just couldn't do the job, but Ericsson's -.35 GAon-GAoff/60 stat isn't out of place with Regehr and Sarich. Phaneuf really isn't that great a penalty killer AND he takes a lot of penalties which also hurts. Hopefully next year Vandermeer can either take Dion's minutes or at least play with him on the 2nd unit PK and blunt some of the damage.
Forward
Well, the Mark Smith experiment didn't work out did it. 21.43 GAon/60 is a pretty scary stat. Yelle, Nolan and Lombardi were just normally bad, I don't know why Nilsson didn't play more, as MG says, it looks like Marcus got in the dog house and couldn't get out. Tanguay should have played a lot more on the PK, but maybe there was some friction there and Alex didn't want to get pigeonholed as a defensive specialist. I don't know. Conroy and Nystrom by the numbers, look the best. Thats a bit of surprise because my anecdotal take on Nystrom was that he struggled on the PK, but I guess I just saw his bad games. The new guys coming in include Glencross who played almost no PK for the Oil is an unknown. Rene Bourque though, by the BTN numbers appears to have been Chicago's second best penalty killer and will undoubtedly get a chance to prove himself in Calgary.
Too many penalties
The Flames take way too many penalties. Phaneuf takes a ton of penalties, but he also draws a lot of penalties. From BTN Phaneuf has taken 35 penalties, but he's drawn 32. Some other interesting tidbits from the table, but Conroy, Lombardi and Nolan all took about twice the penalties that they drew, and for Lombardi, especially thats a surprise and a disappointment. With his speed you'd expect he'd put a lot more pressure on teams to try and stop him.
Conclusions
The Flames have to have a better start on the PK and that means Kipper has to have a better start.
The Flames are getting rid of most of their bad penalty killers; Smith, Yelle, Nolan, Warrener and Hale. With luck they can replace them with good penalty killers like Vandermeer, and Rene Bourque.
If the Flames can just move into the league median in terms of PK and PP production it'll improve their overall goal differential by approximately 12-14 goals. That would probably mean winning the division.
