PITTSBURGH (TNS) – Examine the Pittsburgh Penguins’ six-game winning streak, and you’re sure to find a boatload of goals. Thirty-five of them, in fact. Enough to officially make the Penguins the best offensive team in the NHL.
Look closer, though, and there’s another reason why they’ve been clobbering teams.
“We’ve done a good job of limiting other teams’ chances,” Penguins captain Sidney Crosby said. “When you’re doing that, you’re creating offense and giving yourself a chance.”
Crosby is underselling the Penguins’ defensive efforts of late, but he’s not wrong.
Over the past six games, the Penguins have allowed 14 goals, or an average of 2.3 per contest. In their first 23 games, they allowed an average of 3.0 per game. Five of those 14 also came in a game the Penguins won – Dec. 5 against Ottawa.
Corsica Hockey does the best job logging and quantifying scoring chances, although the Penguins do use their own metric for this, so it’s not exactly perfect.
But using the NHL’s official play-by-play sheets and following Corsica’s definition for what constitutes a scoring chance – taking into account the type of shot, proximity to the goal and what happened on the play before – the number of scoring chances the Penguins have allowed has dropped considerably.
From 6.7 over the first 23 games to 5.8 in the past six.
“We’re getting better as far as our consistency of play,” Penguins coach Mike Sullivan said. “It starts with our play away from the puck. We’re becoming a more difficult team to play against by just getting on the right side of people and making sure we have numbers back.
“For me, it always starts with our decisions that we make with the puck, so we force teams to play 200 feet. The fact that we’re keeping some scores down is an indication of our willingness to compete and play away from the puck. That’s what we’re encouraged by.”
The Penguins are also keeping their opponents’ shots on goal down.
During the streak, they’re allowing 30.7 shots on goal against per game. That’s a stark contrast from the 32.5 they permitted over their first 23 games this season.
The Penguins are naturally going to give up more shots on goal because of their willingness to play an up-tempo game, but Sullivan has wanted the Penguins to guard against playing “chance for chance” games.
They’ve done that.
And the result has been their best stretch of hockey this season.
“It’s hard to sustain winning when you (trade chances),” Sullivan said. “I think our players are well-aware of it. We’re continuing to try and push them and challenge them to be at their best away from the puck so we can cut the chances against down. When we do that, it has a funny way of working in our favor offensively as far as the opportunities that we get at the other end of the rink.”
