The Hockey News’s Connor Eargood discusses the Red Wings’ particularly putrid penalty-kill this afternoon:
The penalty kill trouble runs a little deeper for Detroit. The unit has allowed five goals on 14 penalty kills, a 64.3% rate that ranks third from last in the NHL. Four of those goals came against New York’s top power play, three of which came in that one really bad outing Thursday.
Naturally, Detroit’s goal is to improve that penalty kill, even if the Rangers are one of the top power play teams. And in practice Friday afternoon, the Red Wings spent their usual amount of time working on special teams. But fixing the penalty kill isn’t as simple as taking more reps.
For a situational unit where success is tied so much to reads and instincts, there is only so much that can be simulated directly on the ice. And even when it can, that practice time is also used to coach other special teams that limit what teams can actually do.
There’s a constant tug of war between practicing the penalty kill and the power play with the full complement of players. A number of the best players play on both units — for instance, captain Dylan Larkin or defenseman Moritz Seider — and this makes for a tricky decision of where to place them in practice. On one hand, you want them to practice the PK, but you also need them to construct a good enough power play to simulate good enough reps to be worthwhile.
“One’s not more important than the other, but that’s just how it shakes out,” forward Michael Rasmussen explained Friday. Lalonde expressed a similar message. “We’ve always had that balance. It’s easy to rep power play a lot of times. You lose a little bit of getting your reps and your routes on the penalty kill.”
