The theory of the power play is simple. Spend lots of time in the offensive zone and generate shots, and you will get more goals. If you are spending a lot of time in the defensive zone, you're either not getting penetration to create scoring opportunities, or you're giving up shorthanded attempts. As such, we will be comparing Thursday's 25% successful power play to the 25% successful power play from February 17, 2013, when Sullivan ran the show.
We will set the stage by looking at last season's game against the Washington Capitals. For those of you that have blocked the power plays from seasons past from your memory banks, the running anecdote was that the Rangers passed too much without gaining any better position in the offensive zone. If we are to see this statistically, we would see a lot of possession time with a low shot attempt total.
And sure enough, in the three failed special teams attempts, that storyline was carried to fruition. In all three, we see the Rangers spending over a minute in the offensive zone, but couldn't generate more than one shot per two possessions. Not many goals are going to get scored if each time you get the puck, you gain the zone, get a shot off, and have the puck sent back down into your end of the ice. In fact, over 14 possessions without scoring a goal, they controlled a rebound for second opportunity exactly once. That will not generate many goals. It did generate one however, right off the first faceoff of the power play:
In three quick passes, the Rangers sliced through the Caps penalty kill and got an easy back door goal from Derek Stepan. This is the type of play they had clearly been looking for on the previous power play attempts, but never managed to break through the kill. But realistically, a successful power play has to be more than just opportunistic, and take advantage of the defense breaking out of their box (note the caps defense forming almost a straight line north to south in the above picture). A successful power play needs to force chaos in the back end, not by passing around the exterior, as the Rangers did repeatedly last year, but by pushing the puck toward the net and making openings either on the backside as Richards and Del Zotto did here zig zagging the puck between defensemen, or making wide open spaces for shooters, as Nash did for Staal in Thursday night's game.
And with that, we will talk about Thursday's power plays. As mentioned, of the four attempted power plays, the Rangers managed to convert once. And in the first power play, things looked quite grim to say the least. Of the two minutes the Rangers had the man advantage, they only managed a total of 38 seconds in the offensive zone, and allowed the puck to stay in their defensive zone for a whopping 1:05. Worse, they only averaged 6 seconds in the offensive zone per possession, and two shot attempts. The longest stint they had was 9 seconds in the offensive zone. It was rough to say the least.
After that, it actually started to gel a little. On their next power play, they fired off 4 shot attempts in one minute of zone possession time. Another positive outcome, of 19 possessions not resulting in a goal, three of them resulted in more than one shot on net. It's a small, but noticeable upturn. At this point, what do these statistics mean? Absolutely nothing. These are simply two isolated instances, selected pretty much arbitrarily. We will have to see if the positive trend we watched on a small scale on Thursday night extends to tomorrow in LA, or if our new power play is simply a different face covering the same old problems. I'll be looking into the power play more later on this season once there is actually some data to look at, so stay tuned for more.
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