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A Look at the Jets Penalty Killers

Everyone (I hope) knows the Jets have been awful at killing penalties. I'm going to look at some of the underlying numbers for our penalty killers to see what they tell us:

First the Forwards: (all data from behindthenet of course)

NAME TOI/60 QoC GA/60 SA/60 Sv%
ALEXANDERBURMISTROV 1.81 0.962 5.06 35.9 877
ANDREWLADD 1.72 0.53 3.75 40.8 916
ANTTIMIETTINEN 0.67 -0.529 3.07 43 933
BRYANLITTLE 1.7 0.517 6.18 47.6 855
CHRISTHORBURN 0.54 0.292 10.35 44.8 813
JIMSLATER 2.05 -2.835 11.51 51.3 817
NIKANTROPOV 1.81 0.694 4.65 41.3 899
TANNERGLASS 1.62 -0.456 11.51 51.3 817

A few notes about the columns:

  • TOI/60 is the time on ice spent in 4 on 5 situations per game.
  • QOC is the Quality of Competition (or column headed +/-QoC at behindthenet). For a bit of background on this stat please have a look at Gabe’s FAQ piece here.
  • The next 2 columns are goals against and shots against per 60 minutes of play. They are on ice stats, not individual stats.
  • SV% is the on ice save %.

What do these numbers tell us?

  • Jim Slater leads the forwards in PK minutes. He's almost always been paired with Tanner Glass except at the start of the season when Thorburn filled that role.
  • Next in minutes are Antropov & Burmistrov followed closely by Ladd & Little. Mittens has also seen time on the PK.
  • The QoC indicates that Burmistrov has seen the toughest opponents and Slater the easiest. I'm personally not sure how much stock to put into these numbers. Since Slater & Glass are usually the first pairing out which would usually puts them against the other teams number 1 powerplay unit, intuitively I would expect them to have the highest QoC. There may be sample size issues here.
  • I'm focusing on shots allowed as the best indicator of how good a penalty killer is. In this regard, our worst forward on the penalty kill has been Slater along with Glass and/or Thorburn.
  • Burmi, followed by Antropov, and Ladd have been our best penalty killers.

For the defenseman:

NAME TOI/60 QoC GA/60 SA/60 On-Ice Sv%
DUSTINBYFUGLIEN 0.52 0.31 2.34 28.1 923
MARKSTUART 2.85 0.157 9.68 49.7 837
RONHAINSEY 2.55 0.564 8.04 46 851
RANDYJONES 1.53 0.183 6.76 55.4 891
MARKFLOOD 1.14 0.414 0 43.8 1000
TOBIASENSTROM 1.18 0.266 10.16 47.4 824
ZACHBOGOSIAN 2.87 -0.087 7.1 41.8 855
JOHNODUYAODUYA 2.19 -0.864 3.48 38.7 918
  • Boogie with Stu have been eating up the most PK minutes. Hainsey and Oduya are also used heavily.
  • Byfuglien plays the fewest minutes (although he's played far more than I would have guessed).
  • The QoC numbers indicate that Hainsey, Byfuglien & Flood have faced the toughest opponents, Oduya and Bogosian the easiest. Once again I'm not sure what to make of this.
  • The worst penalty killer has been (no surprise) Randy Jones. Stuart has been the worst of the guys playing heavy minutes.
  • Our best "regular" penalty killer has been new Blackhawk Johnny Oduya.
  • Based on the numbers the best penalty killer has actually been Dustin Byfuglien. Because of his low minutes I think you have to treat this with an asterisk. But it does match something I've suspected for a while: he'd probably be a useful penalty killer.

So what final conclusions can we draw? One jumps right out at me: Jim Slater (or his sidekicks) is no Guy Carbonneau. Noel has cast him in the role as a shutdown forward and the results haven't been good. The use of Slater may be a big part of the reason our PK has struggled so much.

One final acknowledgement: In searching the web for similar articles I came across a few really good ones. By far the one I liked best was this one written on the Canucks by frequent JetsNation writer Cam Charon. A pad-tap to Cam since I leaned so heavily on his work.

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