The NHL's pre-season is a chance to try out new systems with different players. Carol Schram notes which team's power plays and penalty kills are worth a closer look after the exhibitions.
Luke HughesThat's a wrap.
After 15 days and 111 games, the NHL's 2023 pre-season is in the books. And while we never want to read too much into results of exhibition play, the New Jersey Devils deserve a tip of the cap for being the only team to roll through with an undefeated record.
Picking up where they left off last year, Lindy Ruff's crew went 7-0-0 and outscored their opponents 30-13 along the way.
While improving by 49 points in the standings in 2022-23, the Devils were strong in nearly every statistical category. They tied for fourth with 3.52 goals per game, were eighth with 2.71 goals allowed and were tied for the league's fourth-best penalty kill at 82.6 percent.
New Jersey's power play was a little weaker but still in the top half of the league, ranked 13th at 21.9 percent.
After a few off-season roster changes, including the departures of defensemen Damon Severson and Ryan Graves and the addition of Tyler Toffoli up front, the Devils have looked as sharp as ever through pre-season. They surrendered just two goals in 22 times shorthanded, for a penalty kill rate of 90.9 percent. And on the power play, they were 8-for-21. That's a rate of 38.1 percent that even exceeds the Edmonton Oilers' record-setting 32.4 percent during the 2022-23 regular season.
The Devils' power-play scoring was mostly led by who you'd expect. Jack Hughes, Jesper Bratt and Dawson Mercer had two goals apiece. Singles came from Timo Meier and rookie defenseman Simon Nemec, who also scored this shorthanded beauty in the Devils' 3-0 road win over the New York Islanders on Friday.
And while the Tampa Bay Lightning are in tough to maintain their status as an elite squad while Andrei Vasilevskiy is on the shelf for the next couple of months, their special-teams play was elite as they skated to a 5-2-0 pre-season record.
Giving up two goals on 23 shorthanded occasions over those seven games, the Lightning finished up at an impressive 91.3 percent on the penalty kill. At 8-for-22 with the man advantage off the sticks of eight different scorers, they slot in just below the Devils at 36.4 percent on the power play.
One team that placed a big emphasis on its penalty kill during pre-season was the Vancouver Canucks. The club has gone from bad to worse while shorthanded since the return from the pandemic pause and hopes that it has bottomed out at its 71.6-percent kill rate last season. The only team in this millennium that was worse was the 2020-21 Devils in the 56-game shortened season, at 71.0 percent.
Vancouver went out of its way to find more players with penalty-killing chops during the summer. In the pre-season, new acquisitions like Teddy Blueger and Pius Suter delivered.
The Canucks finished out their exhibition schedule on Friday with just three goals allowed on 23 times shorthanded, for a very respectable kill rate of 87 percent.
"We’ve got seven or eight guys that can P.K. for us,” coach Rick Tocchet said after Friday's game. “That’s huge. I like the attitude and I like the structure. (Assistant coach) Mike Yeo is doing a nice job of teaching what we want.”
Bringing up the rear — three teams that changed up their coaching staffs this summer were not able to get their special teams to click during pre-season.
The most worrisome is probably the New York Rangers, who skated to a 1-5-0 record. The Blueshirts are just one year removed from their trip to the Eastern Conference final, and their new coach, Peter Laviolette, has a Cup-winning pedigree and is known for his tight defensive systems.
New York was shorthanded a league-low 15 times during pre-season play. But with six goals allowed while shorthanded, the Rangers finished with a worrisome penalty-kill rate of just 60 percent.
And after finishing seventh on the power play at 24.1 percent in 2022-23, New York managed just one pre-season power-play goal, by Adam Fox, in 21 attempts, for a 4.8 percent success rate that was also the league's worst.
Fans on Broadway must be hoping that Panarin, Zibanejad, Kreider and company are waiting to turn it on when the games that count begin.
The news isn't much better in Nashville. With the Florida Panthers, Andrew Brunette didn't miss a beat when he took over from Joel Quenneville two years ago. The Panthers cruised to the Presidents' Trophy with a 24.4-percent power play and 79.5-percent success rate on the penalty kill. But even being named a finalist for the Jack Adams Award wasn't enough for Brunette to keep his job in the Sunshine State.
After a year as an associate coach with the Devils, the former Predators winger is back — this time, behind the bench. And with his old coach Barry Trotz now holding the GM's reins, the new-look Predators struggled to find their footing in pre-season. They skated to a 1-4-1 record, and their special teams also sat near the bottom of the league: 2-for-28 on the power play for a success rate of 7.1 percent with goals from Filip Forsberg and Tommy Novak and a decidedly grim 16-for-24 on the penalty kill, just 66.7 percent.
That being said, Juuse Saros was his usual sharp self, posting a .927 save percentage over three games. He's the kind of back-end anchor that might help the Predators stabilize as they get more comfortable with their new coach and their massively overhauled lineup.
Finally, there's Anaheim. Not much is expected in the O.C., where the major talking points during the pre-season were the hard-line negotiation tactics of GM Pat Verbeek with promising Trevor Zegras and Jamie Drysdale. But as Greg Cronin finally gets his first NHL head coaching gig at age 60, you can bet that he has wanted to put his best foot forward.
The Ducks finished out the pre-season with a respectable 4-4-0 record, but they ended on a low note with a 7-1 loss to the Arizona Coyotes in Tucson on Saturday. Anaheim also had its chances with the man advantage but went just 1-for-9 on the power play. That dropped the team's overall record to 4-for-35 through pre-season, or 11.4 percent.
Shorthanded, the Ducks allowed Arizona just one goal on five opportunities on Saturday. They finished out exhibition play with eight goals allowed on 29 chances, a successful kill rate of just 72.4 percent.
Like with Nashville, Anaheim has many new faces in the mix this fall and a coach who has not yet had the opportunity to really work with his group on a day-to-day basis. There's work to be done, but almost nowhere to go but up in Southern California.