No team in the NHL has seen more total power plays in their games over the past four seasons than the Winnipeg Jets. This is unfortunate, because the Jets haven’t been particularly good on the power play or the penalty kill. Playing the kind of hockey that results in a lot of power plays hasn’t been in their interest.



It’s fashionable in analytics circles to talk about penalty drawing as a skill but this misses something — it comes with a price. There’s significant evidence that referees prefer to hand out a fairly even number of power plays over the course of a game. If you’ve got a player who draws a lot of penalties, whether by fair means (Nik Ehlers) or foul (looking at you, Dustin Brown), the referees are going to claw back part of that benefit from someone else on your team. It’s not particularly sensible as a system of crime deterrence but it’s what hockey’s got.



Partly as a result of this phenomenon, you...