NCAA Hockey 101: BU's penalty problem

At the start of the year, everyone took too many penalties. As part of the new rules emphasis, everything was getting called and teams were getting five, six, seven power plays a game in a lot of cases.

For any coach, that would be too many. It reduces the number of minutes you’re playing at 5-on-5 and opens the game up to a whole lot more chance. And while that trend has largely gone away as refs relax the rules once again (especially because we’re starting to get into league play and games start mattering more) that hasn’t necessarily been the case for a team that’s one of the best in the country.

By any measure you care to conjure up, the Boston University Terriers are chugging along happily. They’re currently tied for fourth in the Pairwise with Denver, thanks to a strong 12-5-2 record and a four-game winning streak. They have a goal margin of plus-21, which is ninth in the country. Their power play could be a lot better (18.5 percent), especially considering the talent level they bring to the table, but their penalty kill is north of 90 percent, and you really can’t ask for much more than that.

Especially because they have to kill 5.89 penalties per game, one of the highest numbers in the country. That, too, is where the talent comes in. They have a lot of good, drafted defensemen and two-way forwards who can make a huge difference on the PK, and they rely on them heavily.

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It’s good to only allow 11 power play goals in 19 games, obviously. It’s also good to score six shorties (a number that leads the country). But coach David Quinn acknowledges that’s playing with fire to a certain extent, and something his team has worked to correct. At one point in November the problem was so bad the team took to sitting guys down for two minutes when they committed penalties in practice. That seemed to get a bit of the message across.

“You can’t kill six, seven penalties a game and have success against teams that can make you pay,” Quinn said after his team gave UMass Amherst — a team which, fortunately for the Terriers, cannot make you pay with its 4-of-52 man advantage — six power plays at Fenway Park on Sunday. “We’re trying to keep it under four a game. Early on it was just ridiculous. They were calling a lot of penalties and we were getting a lot of penalties. But then we’ve been better and we’ve still got to get better. We’ve certainly cut back a lot.”

That’s certainly true. BU started the year as one of the most penalized teams in the country, giving up more than 13 minutes of power play time per game while only drawing around eight minutes itself for the first handful of games. Several of those, to be fair, were against strong teams like Quinnipiac, Colgate, and Denver (and even Sacred Heart, which has somehow been on 120 power plays in just 22 games). Still, that’s a lot of time spent killing penalties, which potentially will make your top players less effective at 5-on-5 as well, because every minute they spend killing a penalty is one that leads to heavier legs for 5-on-5 and power play time.

So yes, the amount of power play time BU conceded this weekend was a bit of a recent outlier, but nonetheless it’s something Quinn sees as vital to future success, because the Terriers have two against the highly skilled Boston College Eagles in the week ahead. Quinn attributed the uptick on Sunday to the fact that the team’s seven World Junior participants haven’t practiced with the team in the past month, and you can make the argument that was highlighted by the fact that Dante Fabbro (Canada) and Charlie McAvoy and Clayton Keller (gold medal-winning United States) took uncharacteristic — or, to use the term Quinn did, “lazy” — penalties against a rather poor UMass club.

One interesting aspect of the Terriers’ season is that the Terriers are pretty good at 5-on-5. They’ve scored 40 full-strength goals this year and only allowed 26. That they’re only plus-6 in terms of power play goals for and against speaks solely to how dominant the PK has been.

And every game most of the games they’ve lost this year — nearly all of them on the road, incidentally; they’re 6-1-1 at home — have been penalty-fests. They gave Denver 14 man advantages in two games at Magness Arena. They gave Michigan five at Yost. Quinn says he can live with four PKs a game, but BU has only achieved that goal six times in 19 tries.

What might be especially troubling in this regard is the fact that BU takes so many penalties despite the fact that they have the puck far more often than not (they’re plus-93 in 5-on-5 shot attempts, 53 percent). It stands to reason that if you have the puck you do not take penalties, but that’s just not the case with BU. And given the skill level, it’s a little confusing.

The Terriers are, in fact, one of only two teams in the top 10 in penalty kills per game to have a positive shot differential (minus-20 in opportunities but plus-19 in shots on goal in all situations). The other is BC (minus-29, plus-74).

“I think it’s just mental,” Quinn said. “And again, we take them, then we don’t. And it’s not one guy. It’s almost like we’re putting fingers on the holes in the dam and we’ve got one problem fixed, but then it’s another one. I’m not worried. I felt like we had corrected it before the break. But then the break came and we take a month off. I don’t think it’s going to be a problem moving forward.”

A somewhat arbitrary ranking of teams which are pretty good in my opinion only (and just for right now but maybe for a little longer too?)

1. Denver (swept Arizona State)
2. Penn State University (split at Ohio State)
3. UMass Lowell (won at RPI and at UNH)
4. Boston College (beat Providence at Fenway)
5. Boston University (beat Union, beat UMass at Fenway)
6. Harvard (beat Quinnipiac and Princeton)
7. Minnesota-Duluth (tied and lost to Colorado College)
8. North Dakota (swept at Omaha)
9. Notre Dame (split with Michigan Tech)
10. Minnesota (idle)

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist and occasionally covers the NCAA for College Hockey News. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

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