prior to games on January 21st, Calgary's PK was sitting at 22nd -> not great. However, I think that is a misleading stat since I think the goal of the PK should be to end even. Therefore, every shorty should count as a "credit" when judging the PK's efficiency (similar to how +/- works) so I decided to run the numbers to determine the league rank for what I would call "PK Efficiency" -> (GA - GF) / Times Shorthanded.
When using this metric the Flames jump to second in the league @ 88%, behind only Arizona at 96%. Both teams score shorties on 9% of their PK's.
A similar adjustment to powerplay efficiency move the Flames from 8th to 6th (21% efficiency) in the league.
A few other interesting observations:
- The worst few powerplays in the league (Nashville, Philly, Montreal) are scoring around 13% of the time on the powerplay. The Flames and Coyotes score almost as often when they are shorthanded!
- One thing I have noticed this year is that other teams rarely ever dump it in on the powerplay in spite of Calgary's penchant for trying to hold the blue line - and going the other way to score shorthanded when teams fail to break in. I am guessing having two goalies who actively play the puck is a factor in that, and I wonder how many of our shorties are indirectly because teams are afraid to dump it in.
- Your ability to score while short handed seems to be unrelated to your ability to successfully kill the penalty. On the other hand teams with worse powerplays generally seem to give up more shorthanded goals. That makes sense to me since, outside of the flames and coyotes, teams score between 1-4% of the time while shorthanded vs a swing of 13-30% on the powerplay.
I tried pasting my spreadsheet into this post for stat geeks viewing pleasure, but it was unreadable.