from Travis Yost of TSN,

In the last few years a lot more attention has been spent on the frequency with which individual skaters take or draw penalties.

It’s certainly a masked skill but an important one. If you can, with frequency, send your team to the power play (more than you send your team to the penalty kill), you are adding opportunity, goals, and wins.

There are myriad ways to draw penalties (blazing speed and brute strength immediately come to mind), but at the end of the day, a player should be judged on the net impact he has on his team.

Three players from Alberta stand out in a big way here. Connor McDavid in Edmonton, and Matthew Tkachuk and Johnny Gaudreau in Calgary have been massively advantageous to their respective teams in terms of opportunity created. Their ridiculous combination of speed and skill is frequently forcing the opposition to infringe on the rulebook in order to stay level.

continued