Ryan O’Reilly leads the Avalanche with 24 goals, 61 takeaways and zero penalties.

That third number is not a typo. O’Reilly has not seen the inside of a penalty box since last season.

O’Reilly uses precise skills to rack up goals, cause turnovers and play a gentlemanly game. He is the NHL’s most aggressive-passive personality, a perfect contradiction to benefit the Avalanche.

“Growing up, my parents always told me, you can never score from the penalty box. You can never help the team win from the box,” O’Reilly said.

Having played in 61 of 63 games for the Avs, O’Reilly is the only NHL player to have zero penalties despite playing in at least 34 games. Pittsburgh defenseman Rob Scuderi is the only other player to have zero penalties in more than 20 games.

Yet O’Reilly’s aggressiveness has him ranked third in the league in takeaways. He trails Chicago’s Marian Hossa (65) and San Jose’s Joe Thornton (62) in that department, but Hossa and Thornton entered Friday with 16 and 14 penalty minutes, respectively.

O’Reilly’s rare combination of scoring and clean grit makes him the top contender to win the NHL’s Lady Byng Memorial Trophy as the best player who displays the most gentlemanly conduct. Joe Sakic is the only Avalanche player to win the award — in 2001, when Sakic captained Colorado to its second Stanley Cup.

In the 11 seasons since then, future Hall of Famers Pavel Dats- yuk and Martin St. Louis have combined to win the award seven times.

“You look at Sakic and the other names who won that award, and those are great hockey players,” O’Reilly said. “It’s being able to be an effective player within the confines of the game.”

Sakic, now the Avalanche’s top executive, and coach Patrick Roy weren’t aware of O’Reilly’s goose egg until last week.

“No incidental tripping? That’s remarkable,” Sakic said.

“He does not play like that. He’s really good in his battles. He competes,” Roy said of O’Reilly. “He’s playing within the limits, and it’s not a bad thing at all. It doesn’t have any effect on the way he’s been playing and the way I see him as playing. It’s pretty impressive.”

O’Reilly said two things contribute to his penalty-free season: luck and leeway. He said he could have been called for various accidental tripping or interference minors, but thinks his reputation for being such a controlled player buys him a little leeway.

“Use your stick, but keep it down,” O’Reilly said of the basic principles he was taught as a youngster. “You can be aggressive without taking a penalty and jeopardizing the team.”

No other Avalanche player practices stick skills as much as O’Reilly, who has been known to treat the ice sheet as a playground. He sometimes plays games by himself or with young teammates Tyson Barrie and Nathan Mac-Kinnon an hour or more after other members of the Avalanche have showered.

“With Nate and Tyson, we do little control things with your stick, looking at every little detail,” O’Reilly said. “It does carry over to the game, and how you’re using your stick.”

O’Reilly practices yoga, and says that also plays into how he plays hockey.

“Yoga in general is a big practice in discipline, the control over your whole body,” O’Reilly said. “On the ice, it’s a way of practicing discipline. It does obviously help. You’re defending a guy and aware of your body. You can’t put your stick in a certain area. It does correlate.”

O’Reilly does not expect his penalty-free season to continue. He’s waiting to commit a five-minute major for fighting.

“I’m not saying penalties are bad. If someone buries (star center Matt) Duchene from behind, I got to jump in and fight the guy. It’s something you have to do,” O’Reilly said. “There are some good penalties. If a guy is on a breakaway and has a good chance, and you hook him, that’s a good penalty. So I’m not going to play the game not wanting to take a penalty. I still have to be aggressive and keep my edge.”

Mike Chambers: mchambers@denverpost.com or twitter.com/mchambers

Cleaning up

The NHL’s top takeaway leaders, plus their penalty minutes and goals:

Player, teamTkAPIMGMarian Hossa, Chicago 65 16 24 Joe Thornton, San Jose 62 14 9 Ryan O’Reilly, Colorado 61 0 24 Andrej Sekera, Carolina 60 18 11 Eric Staal, Carolina 60 62 16

Mike Chambers, The Denver Post