Study of the penalty killing of Soviet forwards during the 1960-1990 time frame

This year I have been working on a study of the penalty killing of Soviet forwards during the time frame 1960-1990. I have estimated the ice times for every major international tournament (plus Summit Series 72, 74, Super Series 76, 80, 83, 86, 89, Challenge Cup 79 and Rendezvous 87) from which we have available full game footage during that time frame. Additionally I have looked up the shorthanded goal differential of all players from these tournaments. While I encountered some problems doing this study I still think that the results can give some more insight into the penalty killing hierarchy among Soviet forwards as well as some insight into the penalty killing of each individual forward. I know that doing this study have taught me alot about the subject at least. Having said this I will also point out some of the problems that I had before I present the stats.

First it should probably be noted that these estimations are very difficult to get completely right since it is nearly impossible to exactly time a on the fly linechange when watching a game on video. Because of this I have considered two players to be tied with each other when the difference between them was 2 percent or smaller. So if a player was within the 0.98-1.00 range of the player ahead of him I considered them to be tied. The reason why I changed from my earlier 10 second rule is that with that rule there was to many threeway ties for my liking.

It should also be pointed out that the results from the tournaments where we have footage from many games most likely paints a more accurate picture of the penalty killing hierarchy than we can get in the tournaments where we only have footage from 1 or 2 games. Fortunately there was at least a number of boxplay shifts to judge from in all the tournaments with only 1 game of footage except for one (1983 WHC where there only was one boxplay shift in the available full game). Since I have a highlight dvd of the 1983 WHC I decided to also include the penalty killing highlights from that tournament in the study since I figured that for a player to figure much in the highlights of penalty killing he will most likely have had to play pretty much on the penalty kill during the tournament. And in my opinion it gives a more complete picture of the penalty killing hierarchy than only one shift would do. But I would definitely say that the numbers for the 1983 WHC probably are the most insecure regarding how accurate a picture it paints.

Outside of only estimating the ice times and collecting goal differential stats I have also ranked the players based on a combination of their ice time finishes, goal differential stats, the eyetest and in some cases also weighed in previous penalty killing reputation. Since the number of tournaments with available video footage varies much between the 60's and the 70's and 80's I decided that I was going to rank the players based on eras. One group will be the players who had the majority of their primes in the 60's up until the early 70's. The next group will be the players with the majority of their primes in the 70's up until the early 80's and the last group the players from the 80's. On these ranking lists I will also go more into analysing the penalty killing of each individual player while also including some video evidence. These ranking lists will be posted over the coming month/s since they are not completed yet.

Anyway here you have the penalty killing data from the 1960-1990 time frame.

Some general comments:

The Soviet forwards who stood out the most when it comes to penalty killing during the 1960-1990 time frame were in my opinion the following.

- Alexander Almetov and Konstantin Loktev who dominated the first half of the 60's.

- Vyacheslav Starshinov and Anatoly Firsov who dominated the second half of the 60's.

- Vladimir Petrov and Boris Mikhailov who were the leading penalty killers during much of the 70's with their closest competitor being Vladimir Shadrin.

- Vladimir Golikov and Viktor Zhluktov who were the leading penalty killers of the late 70's-early 80's with their closest competitors being Victor Shalimov and Alexander Golikov.

- Sergey Makarov and Vladimir Krutov who dominated the mid and late 80's. Their strongest competitors were Vyacheslav Bykov and Andrey Khomutov.

These 10 players who were the leading penalty killers over a significant time period (Almetov, Loktev, Starshinov, Firsov, Mikhailov, Petrov, V Golikov, Zhluktov, Makarov and Krutov) would probably be my top 10 greatest Soviet penalty killing forwards with Bykov being the strongest other candidate for the top 10.

The player who was the most positive surprise for me during this study was Alexander Maltsev who spent alot more time killing penalties throughout his career than I had expected. Just like many other Soviet greats Maltsev largely built his penalty killing on puck possession but for a player who does not have much of a defensive reputation his performance in his own zone while shorthanded also impressed me. Other players who were positive surprises for me was Victor Shalimov and Vladimir Vikulov. Especially Shalimov who was top 2 in shorthanded ice time during 4 tournaments/series with the national team.

The players who on the other hand surprised me the most in a negative way were probably Sergey Kapustin and (relatively speaking) Vladimir Shadrin. While Shadrin was one of the greatest Soviet penalty killers during the 72-77 timeframe and his performance in the 1976 WOG game against Czechoslovakia was absolutely incredible I had still expected more from him. Perhaps my expectations were too high but having that game in mind before doing this study I expected Shadrin to be among the 5-10 players who would impress me the most and he did not really meet those expectations.

Regarding Kapustin I was already aware that he did not spend that much time on the penalty kill but I had still expected him to rank somewhat higher in the Soviet penalty killing hierarchy than he did during this sample. On both of the two great lines that Kapustin played (Kapustin-Zhluktov-Balderis and Kapustin-Shepelev-Shalimov) he was clearly the player who logged the least amount of shorthanded ice time. When it comes to his actual performance when he did kill penalties I don't have many complaints though.

I guess that some might wonder why I included the Super Series stats of CSKA Moscow but not of other Soviet club teams. The reason is simply that the competition for the spots on the CSKA penalty kill in my opinion was close enough to the competition on the national team for me to include the stats here. At the time of the 85/86 and 88/89 Super Series CSKA had all of the 4 greatest penalty killers from the national team (Makarov, Krutov, Bykov and Khomutov) with only Svetlov and Semenov playing on another team out of the top penalty killers. At the time of the 75/76 and 79/80 Super Series some of the top penalty killers from the national team were on other teams though. Shadrin and Shalimov were among the very greatest penalty killers on the national team at the time of the 75/76 series and the Golikov brothers were probably the greatest penalty killers on the national team at the time of the 79/80 series. Still the competition on CSKA during that time was very strong with all of Zhluktov, Mikhailov and Petrov being among the top penalty killers of that time frame.

Here are the goal differential stats of players with more than 20 minutes of total shorthanded ice time.

While it obviously is very impressive that Irek Gimaev had a goal differential of 0 over 24 minutes and 51 seconds of shorthanded ice I would still say that Vladimir Petrov and especially Sergey Makarov were the most impressive players from a goal differential perspective.

Sergey Makarovs goal differential of -2 over 117 minutes and 16 seconds of shorthanded ice time is an absolutely incredible stat.

Vladimir Petrovs -2 over 55 minutes and 24 seconds is also extremely impressive and an indication of his all-around ability as a penalty killer. Truly great both with and without the puck.

Outside of Makarov, Petrov and Gimaev other players with very impressive goal differential stats were Shalimov, Kharlamov and A.Golikov who all were -1 over ice times in the 20-30 minutes range. In that group I would also include Krutov and Khomutov who averaged -1 every 20 min, 12 sec and 18 min, 12 sec over a very large sample of shorthanded ice time.

The players with somewhat weaker goal differential stats were Shadrin, Larionov, Zhluktov and Vikulov. Since Zhluktov has such a large sample of ice time I think that his goal differential stats are stronger than the others in that group. If we only look at the 1981 Canada Cup, 1982 WHC, 82/83 Super Series and 1983 WHC for example Zhluktov has -1 over more than 26 minutes.

And here are some players with very impressive goal differential stats over ice times in the 5-20 minutes range.

Here is a look at the goal differential among players with more than 20 minutes of shorthanded ice time in Summit Series, Canada Cup, Challenge Cup, Rendezvous and Super Series competition.

Somewhat surprisingly it was Andrey Khomutov who had the best shorthanded goal differential in these tournaments/series. It is however perhaps worth noting that Sergey Makarov (who is second on the goal differential list) actually had a better goal differential than Khomutov in the tournaments/series where the latter had any shorthanded ice time. In those tournaments/series Makarov had a goal differential of -1 (5-6) over the course of 53 minutes and 21 seconds of shorthanded ice time while Khomutov had -1 (2-3) over 42 minutes and 35 seconds.

The rest of this study can be found in this thread. https://forums.hfboards.com/threads/study-of-the-penalty-killing-of-soviet-forwards-during-the-1960-1990-time-frame.2432151/