What to expect from the Minnesota Wild’s special teams this year
Combining powerplay percentage and penalty kill percentage to look at the effectiveness of a club’s special teams in general is useful. Strong special teams definitely correlates with success in the standings. A team’s success in powerplay percentage combined with penalty kill percentage is a strong determinant of how they will finish in the standings.
Here is a table of the how each NHL team fared last year in the combined powerplay and penalty kill percentages, ranked in order of where they finished in the standings for the entire league. As you can see, none of the bottom 10 teams finished with a combined powerplay and penalty kill percentage over 100. At the same time, seven of the 10 top teams did have a combination that eclipsed the 100 percentage mark.
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The Minnesota Wild finished with only a 96.7% on the combination of their special teams success. For them to be successful next year, and improvement in this statistic is vital. The Wild’s powerplay finished at a respectable 17.9%, but their penalty kill was a measly 78.8%.
It is reasonable to expect their powerplay to improve next year. They added goal scoring winger Thomas Vanek, they may have the addition of defensemen Matt Dumba or Christian Folin, and they have added assistant coach Andrew Brunette to the bench. Their younger core players can also be expected to improve offensively. Derek Felska looked not only at the impact of personnel changes to the roster, but also advocated changes to the philosophy of the Wild’s powerplay in an article he contributed to Gone Puck Wild a couple weeks ago.
Last year, Wild head coach Mike Yeo wanted to have two dangerous powerplay units, instead of stacking just the first unit. With the addition of Vanek, it allows for more depth. Despite his playoff woes in Montreal last year, he remains a powerplay threat. He should also have plenty of time to acclimatize himself with his new linemates. In the playoffs last year, Vanek’s compete level didn’t appear very high, but he still went to the front of the net on the powerplay and displayed a good set of hands. He has amassed 123 regular season and playoff powerplay goals over the course of his career.
Folin had a strong Prospects Tournament in Traverse City, making NHL.com’s list of their top 11 players in the tournament. Should Folin or Dumba be able to crack the Wild lineup, they could bring a presence to the powerplay. As mentioned in a previous article, Dumba has the tools that can be very dangerous on the man advantage. It will be interesting to see how each player performs in training camp, which starts today.
Brunette will be on the bench this year as an assistant coach, giving him more control over the powerplay particularly for making midgame adjustments. It will be easy to tell whether Folin or Dumba is receiving powerplay time, and whether Vanek is scoring on the powerplay. It will be much harder to quantify Brunette’s impact on the powerplay that stems from his being on the bench.
Ranked 27th with a 78.8 success rate, the penalty kill left much to be desired last year. Didn’t take many penalties at least. Winger Matt Cooke was brought in as a third line checker and strong penalty killer during the 2013 offseason. The team, however, fell in penalty kill rankings from the previous year. It’s hard to quantify what leads to poor penalty killing. The creation of a stat that tracks average powerplay goals against per minute of penalty kill time by a player, and compares that to both the rest of the league, and the rest of that player’s team (in case they are a strong penalty killer on an otherwise weak penalty killing team), could be useful.
It is hard to predict what the penalty kill will be like next season. Like the powerplay, it is likely that the maturation of the younger players can lead to its improvement. Perhaps adjustments to the systems by Yeo will also lead to its improvement. Overall, the combination of penalty kill and powerplay percentage should, and likely will, increase.