After watching his team surrender three more power play goals in Tuesday’s home loss to the Los Angeles Kings, Oilers coach Todd McLellan admitted that he doesn’t have a solution for his team’s struggling penalty kill.
“We’ve pounded away on it a lot, especially in the last two weeks,” McLellan said in his post-game remarks. “We’ll keep pounding away. I don’t have the answer or we would’ve changed it a month ago.”
The Kings took advantage of Patrick Maroon’s match penalty for a hit on Drew Doughty, scoring three times on the resulting man-advantage in a three-minute span of the third period to blow the game open, winning 5-0.
“It sucked the life out of us,” McLellan said. “Again, multiple mistakes, things we worked on. Cheating sometimes and leaving early, not being able to clear a puck when you execute.”
Those problems have been prevalent all season for the Oilers’ penalty-kill, which currently ranks last in the NHL at 70.8%. That number drops significantly at Rogers Place, where the Oilers have surrendered a league-high 28 power play goals in 21 home games this season. The team’s 55.5% penalty kill success rate at home is nearly 15% lower than the 30th-ranked Philadelphia Flyers (70.2%).
“It’s an obvious sore spot, especially here at home.” Oilers forward Mark Letestu said after practice on Wednesday. “When you’re weak at something, you’ve got to work at it. I think that’s anything in life and right now we’re focusing a lot of time on it because it’s losing us hockey games.”
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That has been especially true on the team’s current home-stand. Edmonton allowed seven power play goals in its last three games, all of which were losses.
McLellan and defenseman Darnell Nurse both believe that the team’s problems on the penalty kill started to affect the team's game in other areas. Nurse said that players are likely to play less aggressively when the penalty kill struggles because they don’t want to go a man down.
“You don’t want to take a penalty and then cost the team the goal,” said Nurse, who has 38 penalty minutes this season. “With that said, penalties happen and it’s an area that we need to get better at and we need to fix, simple as that.”
The Oilers will look to shore up their special teams when they host the Anaheim Ducks on Thursday night. Maroon will not be in the lineup after being suspended by the NHL for the Doughty hit.
"This might be the game we need to get us going & hopefully it is... Any time a team ends your season like they did, you're going to have that in the back of your mind for motivation." @drakecaggiula pic.twitter.com/Q00pS68qcg
— Edmonton Oilers (@EdmontonOilers) January 4, 2018
It will be the Oilers’ first game against their Pacific Division rivals since they lost Game 7 of the Western Conference semifinals last May.