Bad penalty kill sinking Sharks at home (Trending Topics)

Home ice advantage matters a great deal in the NHL.

This shouldn't come as any sort of great shock, of course, but the ability to get in the last change, place your stick second on faceoffs, play in a familiar setting, etc. all adds up to a fairly significant statistical advantage that, of course, leads to plenty more wins than losses.

Since the 2007-08 season, nearly 10,100 regular-season games have been played, and the home team in those games carries a marginal score-adjusted possession advantage of 50.2 percent, high-danger chance edge of 50.9 percent, draws 51.1 percent of penalties, wins 51.6 percent of draws, and perhaps most important a 52.3 percent goals-for advantage. These may seem to be only slightly above average and that is true, but that's lumping in really bad teams — we're talking late-2000s Atlanta Thrashers, recent Buffalo Sabres teams, and all other lottery picks — in with mega-dominant clubs like the late-2000s Detroit Red Wings, and Los Angeles Kings and Boston Bruins and so on.

No surprise here either, but even the worst teams are better at home than they are on the road, and the best ones tend to really turn up their dominance when they're in their own building. And of course when you control possession, quality chances, and everything else, it stands to reason that goals follow, and likewise that wins do as well.

As a result, the average NHL team this season after Wednesday's games had a .592 winning percentage at home. Statistically, that means if the average team played all 82 in their own rink, they'd finish with 97 points or so, well inside the playoff conversation.

However, there are still four teams in the league at least somewhat below .500 on home ice, and for the most part they shouldn't surprise you: Buffalo (.385), Columbus, (.458), Toronto (.477). These are three of the four worst teams in the league. But as to the fourth team, well, it's somehow San Jose, with a 10-12-2 record and a .458 win percentage at SAP Center. They're literally as bad as Columbus at home, but do at least have one extra win from 24 games.

That would be second-in-the-Pacific San Jose. Sixth-in-the-West San Jose. Getting-56-points-from-49-games San Jose. To be fair, that's only the 14th-best points-per-game number in the league right now, behind so-so teams like Boston and Detroit, but when you're that dreadful at home and still pulling anywhere near the top half of the league, you're doing something right.

Aren't you?

Yup, San Jose is better at everything 5-on-5, and pretty well running the show against their opponents regardless of venue.

Now what's interesting here is that the only real notable difference you can see between how they perform at different venues is that their shooting percentage drops to 7.5 percent at home versus 8.3 percent on the road. However, their save percentage at home is also higher and almost totally offsets the issue. Their home/road PDO split is 99.5 to 99.8. Not a huge change, especially in so few games.

But that is, of course, only 5-on-5 data, which isn't always telling when it comes down to it. Not over 50-game samples, at least. So you also have to look at how struggling clubs do when it comes to special teams as well, and indeed it seems as though the Sharks' power play is better away from home than at it. They've scored 19 on 81 (23.4 percent) on the road, and 17 on 82 at home (20.7 percent). Both numbers, however, are above the league average by at least a little bit, so there's not really a problem there either.

They are, likewise, more efficient with their road power play, scoring 8.8 goals per 60 versus 7.4 at home. At SAP Center, though, they also allow fewer shorties per 60 (0.4 to 1.0). But that likewise does not explain the problem.

Now, if we've considered that the Sharks are really good at 5-on-5 and really good at the man advantage, there's only one place left to turn: The PK. And boy, is it ever awful. As you may have guessed.

Their home PK success rate is just 75.4 percent, 27th in the league, and on the road it's a far more robust 83.3 percent, good for ninth. While the number of goals they've allowed at home is actually two fewer, that's on 19 fewer penalties. The Sharks are really, really good at staying out of the box at home (and they're middle of the pack at it on the road), but it doesn't matter if you're only killing 3 in every 4 while the league average is more than 4 in 5.

The question is: Why the hell can't San Jose kill penalties at home?

Yeah, that'll do it. All the road numbers are a little better than league average, and all the home numbers are a heck of a lot worse. It doesn't really make any sort of sense.

But again, these are things we might have been able to guess, right? To give up a lot of goals on the PK you don't really need to take a lot of time out of your day, especially when you're taking some of the fewest penalties in the league at home, but this clearly points to a problem of “process” and not “bad luck.”

You therefore have to dig deeper: Is it a DeBoer problem or a San Jose problem? Well, first it must be acknowledged that San Jose had an awful PK last year as well, and relied upon similar usage of its players at that time, albeit under a different coach. But overall, it was better at home than on the road. Meanwhile, DeBoer has a long track record of being a very good PK coach in general, with very, very little separating home versus road performance in most seasons prior to this one.

Apart from a year here or there with a wider disparity, though, he does seem to have his teams perform slightly better on PKs away from home, but nothing to the extent that would explain this season. He also consistently keeps up the trend of taking far fewer penalties at home than on the road.

So okay, who's being used on the PK, and how? The Sharks do have a fairly impressive group of guys who can kill penalties. Joe Pavelski, Patrick Marleau, Joel Ward, Tommy Wingels, Chris Tierney, and Matt Nieto are the forwards in team's top-nine players in terms of power play time per game. The four defenders are Marc-Edouard Vlasic, Justin Braun, Paul Martin, and Brent Burns. Solid group.

However, only Burns, Marleau, Wingels, and Nieto are actually better at home numbers-wise than they are on the road. The problem is that Peter DeBoer insists on giving them less ice time at home — where he actually controls last change — than he does on the road, perhaps out of necessity or because he feels their minutes are better-allocated elsewhere. But given how little they're on the PK for games in San Jose, how is there not a better distribution there? Indeed, Wingels and Nieto play the two fewest PK minutes per game at home of the team's regular penalty killers, with Marleau fourth-bottom and Burns last among defensemen as well.

Vlasic and Braun, meanwhile get the most PK minutes at home (2.31 and 2.18 per game, respectively) and also get smoked consistently. Their 11.3 and 12.5 goals against per 60 are horrendous. (Nieto's is actually much worse at 18.4, but that's despite a much better process).

In the end it is therefore tough to assign blame to any particular party. Except to say that coaches are generally more responsible for systems play on special teams, and that very much appears to be the issue here. It seems that no one is doing their job well. But if the Sharks can figure this out even slightly, they're looking a lot more like a team to be reckoned with down the stretch and into the playoffs.

However, the data here suggests that this is a particularly big “if.”

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

All stats via War on Ice unless otherwise stated.

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