The issue with the penalty kill comes down to the system

In the first part of this look at the penalty kill, I looked at the penalty kill’s deficiencies from a personnel perspective, and found that although some pairings and players were more effective than others. On the whole, the Montreal Canadiens PK was significantly more hampered by systemic and coaching insufficiencies than the talent levels of the players they could ice.

Having reached that conclusion, the next logical step would be to try to identify the Habs PK scheme and analyze it’s strengths and weaknesses. However, the more penalty kill footage I watched, the more randomness I observed. In the end, while there were a few strategic elements that the coaching staff appeared to impose…