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Brayden McNabb (? Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports)

Special teams have never been less important in building a Stanley Cup winner

Originally posted on Daily Faceoff | By Matt Larkin | Last updated 3/19/24

Building a contender at the NHL Trade Deadline isn’t as simple as checking off a shopping list of must-have ingredients for a Stanley Cup recipe.

But what if it was?

Over the past few years at Daily Faceoff, using the previous 10 NHL seasons as my case-study subjects, I developed a list of traits that were most common among the Stanley Cup winners. I came up with seven. And voila, the Stanley Cup ingredients series was born.

So far, we’ve explored the correlation factor of average team weight, having at least one top-10 scorer, having a top-10 goaltender and exhibiting strong analytics. Next up, we don our hardhats and dive into the importance of penalty killing.

Stanley Cup Ingredient #5: Penalty Killing Efficiency

Note the decision to single out penalty killing and not special teams in general. Why neglect the power play? Well, when initially drafting up the list of seven key Stanley Cup correlators, I didn’t identify a link between a dominant power play and playoff success. It was far more important to limit the damage when you find yourself in the sin bin than to dish it out.

That said, when I conducted the experiment a year ago, even the penalty killing correlation was trending downward. Let’s see how it looks when shifting the 10-year sample of winners forward by a year.

Season	Champion	Penalty Kill %
2013-14	Los Angeles	83.1% (11^th)
2014-15	Chicago	83.4% (10^th)
2015-16	Pittsburgh	84.4% (5^th)
2016-17	Pittsburgh	79.8% (20^th)
2017-18	Washington	80.3% (15^th)
2018-19	St. Louis	81.5% (9^th)
2019-20	Tampa Bay	81.4% (14^th)
2020-21	Tampa Bay	84.2% (4^th)
2021-22	Colorado	79.7% (15^th)
2022-23	Vegas	77.4% (19^th)

Stanley Cup correlation: FAIR, BUT WEAKENING

Whoa. We’re witnessing a changing of the guard here. For the fifth time in the past seven seasons, the eventual champion’s penalty kill failed to crack the top 10 during the regular season. That said: Vegas is just the second winner in the past 10 seasons not to boast a penalty kill in the top half of the NHL. The Stanley Cup champ rarely enters the playoffs with its PK classified as a weak point. And a truly bad penalty kill remains a death knell. The last time a team with a PK in the bottom third of the NHL won the Stanley Cup was 32 years ago when the Pittsburgh Penguins did so, ranked 15^th out of 22 teams.

Is the more important takeaway that teams simply must tighten things up in the actual postseason when it matters? Nope. The Golden Knights had a putrid 71.7 percent PK efficiency in the playoffs last year, 12^th best in the 16-team field. Colorado the year before was passable with the seventh-best PK among the 16.

The prevailing trend right now suggests that 5-on-5 play is a greater predictor of Stanley Cup success than special teams. That said, the power play is trending back upward as a correlator. While only one of the past six champs had a top-five power play, five of the past six had a top-10 power play.

But since we know a team with a terrible PK still isn’t likely to make a deep run, let’s see how the leaderboard looks for 2023-24 – by looking at the bottom 11 clubs through March 17’s action.

Worst penalty killing efficiency, 2023-24 NHL season

22. Chicago Blackhawks, 77.7%
23. Columbus Blue Jackets, 77.7%
24. Toronto Maple Leafs, 76.8%
25. Nashville Predators, 76.3%
26. Arizona Coyotes, 76.0%
27. Montreal Canadiens, 75.4%
28. Minnesota Wild, 74.3%
29. San Jose Sharks, 74.2%
30. Ottawa Senators, 73.5%
31. Anaheim Ducks, 73.1%
32. New York Islanders, 71.8%

For the most part, the bottom of the PK leaderboard looks like the top of the NHL Draft Lottery standings, right? The lowly Sharks, Blackhawks, Ducks and so on populate the basement. But two teams holding down playoff spots land in the bottom third: the Leafs and Predators. The Leafs in particular should be concerned given they have higher expectations than the Predators, who are coming off a playoff miss a year ago. One of Leafs GM Brad Treliving’s trade deadline additions, Connor Dewar, grades out among the best penalty killing forwards in the league this season, so perhaps he can give them a lift.

While the Isles, who are very much in the playoff hunt, have improved in most areas since Patrick Roy took over as head coach, the PK remains their bugaboo. They’re on track to be the 14th team in NHL history, and the third in the past 38 years, to kill less than 72 percent of penalties in a season.