Bruins’ Penalty Kill Making Massive Strides After Miserable Start To Season

BOSTON — As recently as last weekend, the Bruins owned the worst penalty-killing unit in the NHL — 30th place out of 30 teams in percentage of penalties successfully killed.

After reeling off a season-high five consecutive victories, however, they’re now … all the way up to 28th.

OK, the two-spot jump doesn’t appear all that impressive on paper. Nor does the fact that Boston’s penalty-kill percentage still sits at just 75.3 percent, nearly 12 full points behind the Anaheim Ducks’ league-leading mark of 87.1 percent. But the play of the PK during the team’s current win streak has been highly encouraging, to say the least.

After allowing at least one power-play goal in 14 of their first 17 games, the Bruins have surrendered just one total in their last five contests. They’ve held opponents scoreless in 15 of 16 man-advantage situations during that span (93.8 percent), including a perfect 6-for-6 effort last Monday in a shootout win over the Toronto Maple Leafs.

The one blemish on the unit’s recent record came in Friday’s win over the New York Rangers, when a controversial goaltender interference call on Brad Marchand led to a fluky goal that hit both the post and goalie Tuukka Rask’s back before crossing the line.

“We’ve taken stats over the last seven, maybe eight games and we’ve been so much better,” head coach Claude Julien said after Saturday’s game. “… You wish you could start from scratch, you know? Where we are in the league looks bad, but the way our power play has been killing right now, we’d be in the top six.”

That brutal start to the season did happen, though, and the Bruins — an above-average penalty-killing team throughout Julien’s tenure — still have a long way to go to fully recover from it. For reference, Boston successfully killed off 82.0 percent of its penalties last season (good for 12th in the NHL) and hasn’t finished outside of the top half of the league in that category since 2010-11.

Defenseman Zdeno Chara, who averages a team-high 3:35 of shorthanded ice time per game, said he will not be satisfied until Boston’s PK unit again ranks among the league’s elite.

“It’s getting better,” Chara said after Monday’s practice at TD Garden. “Again, it’s something that we’ve got to continuously work on and keep getting better. I don’t think we are over the hump. I think that we want to be one of the best teams in the league as far as killing penalties. We’ve always done that — we’ve always been one of those teams.

“We had a rough start, so we were in a hole, and we’re slowly getting out of it. But it doesn’t mean we are up where we want to be.”

Thumbnail photo via Tom Szczerbowski/USA TODAY Sports Images