Anybody with half-a-brain can see the Oilers need a centre who can win a face-off and kill penalties to make up for the losses of Jarret Stoll and Marty Reasoner. When Horcoff is the Oilers best overall centre on the dot at 51.8 per cent but is just 61-89 shorthanded, it’s tough to argue.

“Maybe now this year, with them (face-offs) being in the zone so much,” Horcoff said when asked if poor performance on the dot is the single biggest factor that has the penalty killing struggling so mightily.

“Face-offs aren’t just one guy’s stat. I think people who know the game and watch the game realize the help is and how important those 50-50 battles are . . . especially on the PK.”

-Robin Brownlee, A Man Who Learns From Watching, OilersNation

When you look at the overall lack of positive correlation, especially in 2008/2009 now that the rules have changed, you can’t conclude that a good faceoff percentage = a good penalty kill. This might be common sense but based on what I’m reading around the internet today I think people are overestimating the impact of faceoffs on Edmonton’s pk train wreck this season. What I’m trying to say is that if one conclusion can be drawn it’s that there are too many elements to a penalty kill to suggest Edmonton should be looking at adding a faceoff specialist alone - faceoff % should take a back seat to players who can actually kill the damn thing off. After all, even a successful faceoff win and dump only shaves 10-15 seconds off the penalty anyway - you still have to kill the whole damn thing off regardless of how it begins.

-Showerhead, Statzi, Irreverent Oil Fans

I’ve been trying to dig into the PK problems over the holiday break - I’ve found some interesting stuff but I’m still in the process of sorting through it all. One thing that’s clear to me: the Oilers 2005-06 PK was an unholy machine in the second half of the season. We talk a lot here about things that have a lack of sustain: that Oilers team blocked an outrageous amount of shots on the PK in the second half (something I’ll touch on when I get around to writing that is how blocked shots should be measured; I tend to think that the sensible approach is blocked shots/shots allowed*60, rather than just a pure per 60 rate, which is what I usually use) but the number of shots that they gave up in the second half was also remarkably low at 33.5/60. Columbus and Nashville were allowing more shots/60 at evens (!) in the second half than the Oilers were when they were a man down; Washington was allowing the same volume.

That’s neither here nor there though. This post is going to be narrowly focused on the topic of faceoffs and penalty killing. Faceoffs were a topic of discussion here back in the summer of 2006; call it the internet version of fiddling while Kevin Lowe ran around with a jug of gasoline and an insane gleam in his eye. I had two posts up about the topic, one dealing with faceoff zones and the other with the advantage in putting your stick down second, which attracted some comments but, quite reasonably, it seemed that most people were spending the late summer doing other things. With the putrid PK this season, people are casting about for reasons why and the departure of Stoll and Reasoner provides a tantalizing storyline.

The NHL started to do something differently last year: they recorded the game state in the play-by-play files for faceoffs. Although they were tracking it internally beforehand, they didn’t publish it. They don’t compile these stats on a team level now, but as the information is in the play-by-play files, we can go through and put together the stats on a team level - all one has to do is turn the play-by-play files into a useable database, which is a Sisyphean task of its own.

In any event, I did that and something interesting shows up on the team level. Teams on the PP enjoyed a significant edge in 2007-08 when it came to faceoffs: they won 11 out of 20. That may not sound like a lot, but there wasn’t a single team in the NHL that managed to win 55% of its faceoffs over the course of a season, so it strikes me as a pretty significant edge. Here’s the chart:

faceoff

Horcoff would seem to have a point. It was, in 2007-08 at least, just more difficult to win faceoffs shorthanded than it was to win them generally. This is something that Vic Ferrari has mused about in the past, suggesting that the team on the PP is at an advantage because it has more guys who can come in to help out when a draw isn’t cleanly won.

There’s the odd team that did better on SH faceoffs than it did on PP faceoffs; that’s to be expected, I would think, when you consider that a subset of the team takes the bulk of the special teams faceoffs. For example, Horcoff has taken 49.5% of the Oilers PK faceoffs this year and Brodziak has taken 33.6% of them. On the PP, Horcoff has taken 54.4% of 285 faceoffs (winning 59.4% of them), while Brodziak has taken just 3.5%. Gagner is second, with 16.8% of the PP draws. The change in personnel is going to affect the team faceoff success rate.

In fairness to Robin, I note that there was some moderate degree of correlation between PK faceoff success rate and PK% last year, at .449. The difficulty that I have, as I’ll set out below, is that the Oilers PK has absolutely cratered this year. I’m not opposed to the argument that their faceoff woes are part of the problem but I have a harder time believing that it’s the most significant problem facing the PK unit. I think that Showerhead has it when he writes “…there are too many elements to a penalty kill to suggest Edmonton should be looking at adding a faceoff specialist alone - faceoff % should take a back seat to players who can actually kill the damn thing off. After all, even a successful faceoff win and dump only shaves 10-15 seconds off the penalty anyway - you still have to kill the whole damn thing off regardless of how it begins.”

You’ll note that the Oilers won 47.6% of their shorthanded faceoffs in 2007-08, good for 6th in the league. The current edition of the club has won 126 of 303 faceoffs while shorthanded this year, good for a 41.6% success rate. The Oilers took 8.03 PK faceoffs/game last year; this year they’ve taken 8.4 PK faceoffs game. If the Oilers were rolling along at last year’s rate, they’d have won 144.2 faceoffs so far this year instead of 126. So what we’re talking about here is an extra lost faceoff on the PK every second game this year.

To tie it all back to the crack at Brownlee that I opened this with, through thirty games, the Oilers were giving up an extra 10.6 PPSA/60 over their rate from last year. At last year’s rate of 49.9 PPSA/60, they would have allowed 182 PPSA through 30 games instead of 221. Does it really seem plausible that an extra 15 lost faceoffs (through 30 games at a rate of one extra loss per two games; some of which wouldn’t have been in the Oilers end anyway) is responsible for an extra 39 shots against? The logic doesn’t seem to be there to me; it might be a contributing factor but I just can’t see it being the most significant problem.

The failure of the current PK is probably due to a lot of different factors but it’s hard to overlook the drop in save percentage. Last year, the Oilers posted an .892 on the PK; they’re currently sitting at an .863. Over the course of 265 PK shots, there’s 7.7 goals on the difference in save percentage alone. Considering that the Oilers are currently about 14 goals off of last year’s pace on the PK, more than half of that is probably tied to the dip in PK. Whether that falls on the goaltending or the quality of chances given up, it strikes me that any argument that the inability to win faceoffs is the key factor in this drop needs to somehow link 18 lost faceoffs with a massive drop in save percentage. I have an awfully hard time seeing how that can be done and so, at present, I see the faceoff problems as likely being, at best, a tertiary factor in the general decline of the PK, somewhere behind the bounces and not stopping as many pucks as they did last year.