BLOG: Oilers penalty kill's resurgence a result of increased ownership from players

EDMONTON, AB – After Winnipeg Jets centre Cole Perfetti redirected Mark Scheifele’s slap pass on the power play behind Stuart Skinner at 1:33 of the first period to make it 1-0 this past Thursday, Head Coach Kris Knoblauch sensed some extra disappointment in his penalty killers.

The frustration wasn’t necessarily borne out of conceding the game’s opening goal, but from the immense pride that each one of those penalty-killers takes in their work that helped contribute to such a strong stretch of results while shorthanded over the previous five games.

“When they did score that goal, you could see the guys upset,” Knoblauch said. “They were, ‘Oh, man, we had a streak going,’ so there's a lot of ownership in that and I think that's very important.

“Having something that you're good at, you're invested in and you know the role, you're most likely going to be executing it to your best ability.”

Perfetti’s goal with the man advantage put an end to a five-game streak of 21 successful penalty kills for the short-handed unit of the Oilers that’s been resurgent under Coach Knoblauch by killing off 33-of-37 penalties over nine games for an 89.2 percent efficiency – a marked improvement from their 71.7 percent return rate over the previous 14 games before Knoblauch took over behind the bench for his first game on Nov. 13.

But like Edmonton’s equally resurgent power play that’s gone 10-for-33 (30.3 percent), the penalty-killers knew there’d be another opportunity to have an impact on the game.

The penalty kill kept its composure with two vital kills in the final period before the power play came up clutch through Leon Draisaitl with 2:13 remaining to lift the Oilers into a late 2-1 lead after Darnell Nurse broke through after the 13-minute mark to equalize.

Suffice to say, without those two penalty kills, Nurse’s equalizer likely doesn’t happen and we’d be having very different thoughts about last Thursday’s comeback win over the Jets.

“I think we're just really able to get a hang of it now,” Mattias Janmark said on Monday. “Even Brownie was saying the other day how we're really figuring out the PK, so it's always nice to hear that because that's a huge part of being able to win games, especially when it comes to crunch time.”

In this League, especially when you contribute on either side of special teams, ownership of your work is important and the Oilers players are putting the onus on themselves to follow through on their roles and responsibilities.

“Confidence is a big thing on the penalty kill, both from the goalie and the players,” Janmark said. “You're just confident in what you can give up and you know where you're going to get the saves from, and then, you'll also go through slides where it feels like whatever you do, the puck ends up in the back of your net. We are kind of in one of those confident hot streaks right now and I think to keep that going, you've got to bear down on the details.”

“We got scored on last game, so now we’ve got to get back to the details and look at what we can do better.”

Stuart Skinner gave a tap to defenceman Mattias Ekholm after the Jets broke his team’s successful short-handed streak because the netminder knows just how good the penalty-killers have been in front of him.

They say your best penalty killer has to be your goalie, but the Oilers shot-stopper continually heaps praise upon the players in front of him that’ve helped him let in only one power play goal against in the last five games and help him assemble a .931 save percentage over the last four games.

“Huge credit to the guys in front of me,” he said. “I've said this probably 100 times, but the PK has just been really good, which is a huge help for just being able to win games in general. So that's huge props to the forwards and the D really being committed on our PK, on our power play and just the game overall, so it's been very good.”

Beyond Assistant Coach Mark Stuart’s work running the penalty kill, Janmark has been a pivotal player for the Oilers while shorthanded as one of those individuals in the bottom six who takes major ownership in his role on special teams.

The Swede missed a month of action due to injury but has played 12:33 of the 37:01 short-handed minutes that Edmonton has been tasked with killing off over the last five games since returning, as per Natural Stat Trick.