Penalty Kill Percentage (PK%)
The percentage of times a team successfully kills a penalty without allowing a goal. The inverse of the opposing team's power play percentage against.
Penalty Kill Percentage (PK%) measures how effectively a team prevents the opposition from scoring during power plays. If a team faces 100 penalties and allows 18 power-play goals, their PK% is 82%. The NHL average typically sits around 78-80%.
PK% is the defensive counterpart to PP%. It reflects a combination of goaltending quality, defensive structure, shot suppression, and penalty-kill personnel. Unlike even-strength defense, penalty killing is a specialized skill -- teams deploy specific PK units, and some players are significantly better in shorthanded situations than others.
Analytically, shorthanded defense is one of the most difficult areas to evaluate at the individual player level. The sample sizes are small (most penalty killers log only 1-3 minutes of shorthanded time per game), and goaltending has an outsized influence on results. This is why the SHD component of GAR is acknowledged as the most uncertain part of the model.
Formula
PK% = 1 - (Power Play Goals Against / Times Shorthanded) x 100 NHL average: ~78-80%
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a good penalty kill percentage?
The NHL average is around 78-80%. A PK% above 82% is very good, and above 85% is elite. Below 76% indicates significant problems on the penalty kill.
How much does goaltending affect PK%?
Significantly. Goaltending has a larger influence on PK% than on even-strength results because there are fewer shots but they tend to be higher quality. A hot goalie can mask a struggling PK structure, and vice versa.
Why is individual PK evaluation so difficult?
Penalty kill shifts are short and infrequent, producing very small sample sizes for individual players. Combined with the outsized goaltending influence, it is extremely hard to isolate one skater's individual contribution to the penalty kill.
Is PK% or PP% more important for team success?
Neither is as important as even-strength play, which accounts for 75-80% of game time. Between the two, PK% has historically shown a slightly stronger correlation with team success than PP%, partly because penalty killing reflects team discipline and defensive structure.