McDavid, Gaudreau and the art of creating opportunity

Travis Yost

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In the last few years a lot more attention has been spent on the frequency with which individual skaters take or draw penalties. 

It’s certainly a masked skill but an important one. If you can, with frequency, send your team to the power play (more than you send your team to the penalty kill), you are adding opportunity, goals, and wins. 

There are myriad ways to draw penalties (blazing speed and brute strength immediately come to mind), but at the end of the day, a player should be judged on the net impact he has on his team.

Three players from Alberta stand out in a big way here. Connor McDavid in Edmonton, and Matthew Tkachuk and Johnny Gaudreau in Calgary have been massively advantageous to their respective teams in terms of opportunity created. Their ridiculous combination of speed and skill is frequently forcing the opposition to infringe on the rulebook in order to stay level.

McDavid, as it stands today, has drawn the biggest number of penalties against. Twenty-nine times the opposition has had to haul him down, which is four clear of second-place Nikolaj Ehlers of the Winnipeg Jets. The two penalty magnets in Calgary – Tkachuk and Gaudreau – have drawn 22 and 20, respectively.

The Top 10 lists by sheer volume and rate (per 60 minutes) are shown below, and there’s an important distinction here. While McDavid has drawn the most penalties in volume, Tkachuk has actually been the most successful on a per-minute basis. (Data via Corsica)

That’s a massive advantage to your team if you are an Oilers or Flames fan. Think about it from Calgary’s perspective: With barely half of the season complete, just the combination of Tkachuk and Gaudreau has been able to draw 42 penalties for the Flames. That’s an awful lot of power-play time for a man advantage that’s been reasonably productive when given the opportunity. (An even better example would be Nick Foligno in Columbus – 18 favourable penalty calls for a power play that’s blowing the doors off of every penalty kill unit in the league? That helps.)

I mentioned penalties taken earlier, which provide an equally interesting data point. If you are, say, Tom Wilson in Washington, how helpful are the 16 penalties you’ve drawn? Well, not nearly as much when you consider that he’s also taken 13. Net three penalties, in the grand scheme of things, means very little.

To that end, let’s reshape our data and look at the top-10 skaters in the league by penalty differential as opposed to penalties drawn. Does it change the story?

I don’t know what’s more fascinating – the fact that Gaudreau hasn’t taken a single penalty this year or that Tkachuk has totally dropped off the page. Tkachuk’s incredible talent at drawing penalties (22) is offset by his tendency to take penalties (24), which means he’s actually helped as much as he’s hurt the Flames this year.

Gaudreau and McDavid are still the cream of the crop. Outside of their wondrous skills and scoring abilities, the math on this is pretty simple. If you assume you both score and concede on 20 per cent of opportunities, then 20 additional power plays gained means just their penalty drawing prowess has added four goals over the course of the year. That’s worth about a win already this season, and again, we are just talking about penalty minutes – not the millions of other things they do well.

In such a razor-close league where winning at the margins is imperative, this sort of stuff matters. And no doubt about it, Peter Chiarelli and Glen Gulutzan will take as much help as they can get as their squads push toward the playoffs.