With a blank slate, Kings focused on replicating second-half success on the penalty kill

Through six games last season, the LA Kings sat 31st in the NHL in penalty kill percentage, having conceded seven goals from their first six games of the season. A 7-3 October loss in St. Louis saw the Blues tally four power-play goals in one game and after a four-game road trip, the Kings sat barely over 50 percent on the penalty kill, which set a difficult hurdle to come back from.

By the end of December, the Kings had risen to 27th in the league. By the end of the season, they sat in 22nd. While far from perfect on the penalty kill last season, the Kings certainly improved as the year went on. 22nd out of 32 teams isn’t a total you print on the front page of the season-ticket pamphlets, but rising nearly 10 spots after a disastrous start isn’t an awful sign of progress, either.

“I know everybody looks at the standings and they go well, they’re 31st and what’s kind of interesting for me last year is that we got off to a terrible start and when you get tapped for four in one game, it’s hard to recover,” Kings Assistant Coach Trent Yawney said. “No one wrote that they jumped from 31st to 22nd at the end of the year and that is pretty impressive, it’s a credit to them. It doesn’t happen all the time.”

Defenseman Mikey Anderson talked about the importance of segments and how the team tries to break things down by certain segments of the season.

When you give up as many power-play goals as the Kings did early last season, you’re starting behind the eight ball essentially from the get-go. Without an exceptional recovery, it’s unlikely to completely work past that type of start to the season.

At a minimum, it’s a project that would take months to truly come back from. Seeing how things break down over 10 or 20 game segments helps teams to keep things in perspective in the interim, as opposed to a wider lens. Smaller segments allow for an honest assessment of how a team has been in recent memory, both positively and negatively.

“We’ve looked at in segments, you take a 20-game segment and look at how you’re doing as a unit,” Anderson explained. “Obviously, that one game kind of wrecked everything we had, but if you block it off into different chunks, we had a good penalty kill at times throughout the rest of the year. As much as it’s a full number, there’s ups and downs, peaks and valleys. It’s trying to analyze how you’re doing in your 10, 20 game segments and kind of go from there.”

The other factor to consider when evaluating the Kings penalty kill last season is the fact that the team ranked third in the NHL in shorthanded goals for, which led to a net PK percentage that ranked the team higher in the standings. Over the course of the last three months of the season, the Kings were a Top-10 team in net PK percentage, which reflects shorthanded goals as well as penalties killed.

Now, shorthanded goals are not the primary focus of a penalty-killing unit, but perhaps a result of doing other things well. The Kings have a lot of speed on that unit and when opportunities present themselves, they’re not looking to hold back.

“Honestly, shorthanded goals are like a cherry on top, that’s not really the standard,” Trevor Moore, who led the Kings in shorthanded goals last season, said. “Yanwns has been preaching for the last couple of years that we want to be aggressive and we want to go chase down pucks and make it hard on their team. Shorthanded goals are a product of that, so I think that his structure gives you opportunities but keeping the puck out of the net is the most important.”

Yawney was sure to emphasize that the primary instruction given isn’t necessarily to score goals while shorthanded, but at the same time, he’s emphasizing aggressive play. Moore noted that players have the freedom to take an opportnity if it’s there, but it’s not the primary goal of the system, either.

Aggressive play can go a couple of different ways. It applies to the kill itself, which is something that Yawney encourages. At times last season, he felt that the Kings were too passive on the penalty kill and typically those were the times when they got burned. Aggressive play can also come in the form of shorthanded opportunities and those moments are ones that can change a game.

“If you take last year, I [remember] all of them, but they were turning points in some of those games,” Yawney said of the shorthanded goals. “We did get bit a couple times thinking that we had a scoring opportunity that ended up in the back of our net, so you don’t want to coach the offense out of them on the PK but remind them that killing the penalty is the priority and anything after that is a bonus. Staying aggressive, that’s kind of our word, to just stay aggressive when the opportunity does provide itself whether it’s on the killing side, the defensive side or we get the offensive opportunity to take advantage of it.”

As the Kings get back at it this season with the start of training camp, they have a few things going for them that will hopefully get things off to a better start than last year.

For starters, the personnel is nearly identical to last season. Units had turnover entering last season and those took some time to gel together. With all of the injuries last season, there was a ton of mixing and matching throughout the season as well.

Early in camp, when groups are larger, typically the focus on the ice has to be on a wider scale and the focus on special teams is mostly done through video work, meetings and system refreshers. Having some consistency with personnel, and a larger group that remembers the system, is a step in the right direction.

“Pretty much everyone’s back, so we have an idea of what we want to do,” Anderson said. “It’s kind of just going over it in the room again, talking about it and watching video, but until you go through it and kill some penalties, you’re just trying to get back into it and then find the right ways to do it. I think communication and trying to kind of readdress everything we’ve talked about the past couple years is key.”

That’s not to say the units we saw last season will be exactly the units we see this season, however.

Preseason is a time for experimentation and a time to try things out as they could come during the regular season. It’s an opportunity to see how players who maybe didn’t kill penalties last season fare in those roles. Exhibition games, which don’t carry the downside of dropping points, are the perfect time to implement that.

“We’re hoping to find some new players, guys that maybe you don’t think are going to be penalty killers,” Yawney added. “You put them in situations and they take advantage of an opportunity and when you’re not dressing your full lineup, you have that that option. Todd has tried to work some different guys through, who were here last year but haven’t really been put [on the PK] in a game situation. “These exhibition games provide that and it’s good to see how they react in a practice versus a game because it is different.”

As we approach opening night in 10 days time, the Kings have a goal of starting quickly on the penalty kill. Seeing a boost at the start of the season could do wonders for the team from an overall standpoint. The Kings want to be more like the team that killed penalties during the second half of the season (11th in Net PK) as opposed to the first half (26th in net PK).

“We kind of dug ourselves a hole last year and it took us close to the whole season to try and come out of it. Our numbers weren’t really where we wanted them to be, so I think a goal of ours is to start off really well on the penalty kill,” forward Blake Lizotte said. “I take a lot of pride in that and I think boosting our numbers by at least a couple of percentage points is a good goal.”

This week upcoming, we’ll do a similar exercise with regards to the power play, with a focus on a new outlook after a difficult season. Over the past week we’ve talked with additional members of the Kings coachng staff, including goaltending coach Bill Ranford and new assistant coach Jim Hiller, for a deeper dive into their positional groups and special teams responsibliities. That content will flow onto the site here on practice days during the final week of camp!