Most Costly Penalties: Part II

In a comment on the previous post J.P. of Japer's Rink asked what percentage of a player's penalties resulted in a power play against. Some guys take a lot more penalties than other so perhaps it is not so surprising that Holik is in the box for 4 PP goals against.

Here is a quick and dirty look at the PK rate for each player. I'm using PP Goals Against divided by minor penalties (which offset every once in a while, but the vast majority of minor create a power play for one team or another).

Thrashers PK % When This Player is in the Penalty Box

Forwards
00% 0/1 Haydar
60% 4/10 White
75% 1/4 Kozlov
80% 2/10 Slater
82% 4/22 Holik
83% 1/6 Sterling
86% 1/7 Little
86% 1/7 Dupuis
89% 1/9 Perrin
90% 1/10 Hossa
100% 9/9 Kovalchuk
100% 0/9Recchi
100% 0/5 Thorburn
100% 0/3 Boulton
100% 0/2 Popovic
100% 0/1 Larsen
n.a. 0/0 C. Stuart

Defense
62% 5/13 Havelid
66% 1/3 McCarthy
75% 4/16 Klee
78% 2/9 Exelby
79% 4/19 Zhitnik
80% 2/10 Enstrom

Goalies
0% 0/1 Lehtonen
66% 1/3 Hedberg
100% 1/1 Pavelec

Now J.P. also made the observation that the Thrashers seemed more likely to allow a PP goal against when one of the members of the PK unit was in the box. Presumably they had to use someone who was not as good to fill in or they used the same players and perhaps they were not as fresh because of more PK ice time.

So I thought this was an interesting question--does it really hurt when one of the PK guys is serving a penalty so let's take a look at it.

If a PK guy is in the box the PK% is: 78%
If a PK guy is NOT in the box the PK% is: 86%

So that seems to be some fairly strong empirical evidence that it is bad thing for the Thrashes when one of their regular PK guys heads off to the penalty box.