The Buffalo Sabres penalty kill was tough to watch this season. Assistant coach Steve Smith has run the unit for the past two years. Now that the season is likely over for the team, I wanted to get an idea of what happened with the penalty kill the last two years.

I did a deep dive into a variety of areas to get the best possible grasp of the players and team performance. Going through the results over the last two years you see some concerning trends, but also some drastic changes from year to year.

Overall Performance

The Sabres finished this season ranked 30 on the kill after finishing the 2018-19 season ranked 12. That variation in output is odd year over year when the same coach and players are behind the penalty kill.

The data point that takes a drastic change from 2018-19 to this season is the performance of the goaltenders. Carter Hutton and Linus Ullmark were strong on the penalty kill last season and inflated the overall performance of the unit.

As you can see above, the Sabres were 10 in the league in save percentage on the penalty kill at 86.87%. Combine that with a league-average shot quality against (xGA/60), you can start to see why the overall ranking was in the top half of the league.

This season, the goaltending results were among the worst in the league down a man.

They were 29 in PK save percentage this season. Combine that with the fact that they allowed a higher rate of quality shots against, you can begin to see why the team struggled with special teams unit.

Only two teams in the league allowed more multi power play goals against games than the Sabres. They allowed 11, while the New York Rangers and Detroit Red Wings allowed 12 and 13 respectively. This season it turned out that 32.6% of the shorthanded goals against were tying that lead to a loss or go-ahead goals.

This gives you an idea of how this special teams unit was detrimental to the success of the team. Only three of the power-play goals allowed were the game-winning goals in a one-score game. While that doesn’t seem like a big deal, it’s a six-point consequence in just those three games.

The System

I’m not a fan of the passive 1-1-2 formation that the Sabres have used now for two years under Smith. It allows the opponent to easily set up their structure within the zone and puts little pressure on the power play. The system is supposed to seal the middle of the ice and force the opponent to take low-quality shots from the perimeter.

However, the strategy of making one forward roam all over the ice while keeping the other three mostly stationary results in the unit running around and thus opening up windows in the middle of the ice. Let’s look at some videos quickly to get an idea of what I’m talking about.

This goal by Martin Kaut shows an example of poor goaltending and an inability to protect the danger areas of the ice.

Earlier in that game, Gabriel Landeskog opens the scoring with a power play goal. Nathan MacKinnon is given a ton of room on the wall due to the passive nature of the system. Then JT Compher is allowed to just walk out to the front of the net from under the goal line and Landeskog crashes the net to clean up a rebound in front. None of these players were even touched

It’s difficult to understand why the Sabres didn’t appear to change up their system all year. They were bleeding shots from the slot this season while shorthanded and didn’t have the goaltending to bail them out.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Sabres finished near the bottom of the league in unblocked shot attempts against (FF/60) and shot quality against (xGA/60) while shorthanded. It backs up what we’re seeing in the video and what you observe from just watching the games.

Players

As I mentioned, we didn’t see a new group of penalty killers transition into that special team’s unit this season. Jason Botterill returned every player on the roster from 2018-19, except for one. Therefore, the same players were being relied on in this role with a few exceptions, like Jimmy Vesey.

As you can see most of the players used on the kill graded out poorly compared to the rest of the league. Jake McCabe was the only “full-time” penalty killer that wasn’t below average in shot attempts and quality against while on the ice.

You’ll also notice on the chart above that Michael Frolik was statistically one of the worst penalty killers in the league while playing for the Sabres. Botterill brought him in to not only help boost the offense but assist a penalty kill unit that was drowning.

It didn’t work.

This is where it gets interesting for me. The top penalty killers on the team didn’t see consistent minutes on the unit. Vesey came over from the Rangers as a good PK’er and his numbers with the Sabres were league average. Which, is better than most on the team.

Rasmus Asplund was an effective player on the penalty kill as well, but the longer he stayed up with the Sabres the fewer minutes he received while shorthanded. He received no time on the penalty kill in three of his last four games before being returned to the AHL. Asplund wasn’t only good suppressing shots but also created some offense.

We’ll get back to that shortly.

The chart above breaks down the time on ice per games played. The players highlighted in red are the ones that graded favorably in the chart above. Yet, they’re among the group that received little in terms of ice time while shorthanded.

“Power Kill”

The player in the last two charts that caught my attention was Jack Eichel. He received the fewest minutes per game, but he was arguably the best penalty killer on the team in the limited minutes. Now, we should note a few things:

1. It’s a small sample size.
2. He was used primarily situationally on the kill. He was deployed late in the kill and 49% of his time on the ice shorthanded was while the team was trailing.

It appears the Sabres had a plan to utilize Eichel more while shorthanded and it’s a smart approach. It makes the opponent uncomfortable and gets them out of thinking completely about the offense. It can also force the power play unit to take fewer chances because of the scoring threat on the ice. They don’t want to risk a careless turnover.

As the season went on, Eichel saw less time on the penalty kill.

I wouldn’t advocate for giving Eichel an overabundance of time on the penalty kill, but they could have utilized him more than they did this season. As the old cliche goes “the best defense is a good offense.”

The common practice in the past has been to put players with strong defensive abilities on the kill. Meghan Hall showed during his presentation at the RIT Analytics Conference, there’s a trend going on around the league that is seeing teams add players with more offensive ability to the power play.

Those in the analytics community refer to this as a “power kill,” which was introduced by Mike Pfeil during his presentation at the Seattle Analytics Conference last year.

It appears as though the Sabres are heading in the opposite direction of this trend as you can see in Meghan’s chart I linked above and by looking at the players they continue to lean on to kill penalties.

This past season, Curtis Lazar, Eichel, and Asplund were three of the better forwards in the league when it came to generating offense while shorthanded.

Matt Cane, who now works for the New Jersey Devils, created his penalty kill aggressiveness metric to determine if an aggressive penalty kill results in more goals against.

Cane’s metric adds together penalty kill controlled and failed entries for. Then is divided by the entries the penalty kill unit faces. His theory was that a penalty kill unit that entered the offensive zone with possession was an aggressive killing unit. Matt only used one season’s worth of data so more work needs to be done in this area, but here is an excerpt from the article on his conclusion:

“While one season of data is obviously too little to draw sweeping conclusions from, it does appear that team’s may see better results the more they actively try to score on the penalty kill. Although the degree to which a team will be able to apply this will obviously depend on the personnel they have available, the data also suggests that the traditional “penalty kill specialist” may not be that useful of a role, particularly for forwards.”

This brings us back to using some more aggressive and offensive players on the penalty kill. They were getting good results with Eichel and Asplund. Yet, the coaching staff for the Sabres didn’t see the value in that. They stuck with their passive system and it cost them dearly this season.

There’s no denying that the special teams, in general, let the team down. They had the second-lowest goal differential among special teams units (power play and penalty kill) this season at -15. They were tied for the fourth-lowest penalty kill differential in the league this season at -42 according to Evolving Hockey.

The Sabres have been a bad team for so long and perhaps it’s time they start paying attention to trends in the league. Putting in place a more aggressive penalty kill comes with a risk but what they’re doing isn’t working. It can help cover some shortcomings they have in goal and with their defense.

Smith deserves a lot of criticism for the performance of the penalty kill unit this season. They performed better on the kill last year but were buoyed by a strong performance in goal while down a man. The system itself failed and player usage was questionable throughout the season. It cost this team multiple games and impacted the club’s ability to be a real player in a playoff race before the campaign was suspended.

Data via: Meghan Hall, Hockey Graphs, Evolving Hockey, and Hockeyviz.com