Since March 2 against the Dallas Stars, the Blackhawks' unit has only allowed four goals on 25 penalty kill chances. Chicago has successfully killed their last eight opportunities since March 10 against the Florida Panthers.
Looking towards the Avalanche matchup, head coach Luke Richardson stated that the Blackhawks need to be able to keep up with the fast-paced team. For Chicago, keeping up with the speed and maintaining their pressure is going to be a major key to kill off those penalties.
"I think are up ice pressure really put some pressure on teams," Richardson said. "Tonight, we got to be a little careful with that with their speed that we don't get lost and lose a guy, but we still need to try it because sitting back isn't going to work against these guys either."
In their last 10 games, the Avalanche power play unit recorded 10 goals on the man advantage. Currently the team's unit ranks fifth in the league at 24.4 percent.
One of the reasons that Colorado performs well on the power play is due to the unit playing together for a long time and the tough skills that they provide. A main focus of the penalty kill, will be finding those Avalanche tendencies to shut them down.
"First things first is probably staying out of the box as much as we can," Tinordi said. "But yeah, I think it's kind of know where their threats are and know what they're looking for and watch a little pre scout and kind of see what their tendencies are, and then just kind of go from there."
With a challenging unit, the Blackhawks will have to try and focus and react rather than overthinking on different plays.
"They can recover pucks quick, and they get a lot of extended O-zone time which gets penalty killers tired," Richardson said. "That's when you kind of make mistakes or you shrink and that gives them more room. They don't really do one thing. They do 10 things so it's really hard to kind of pinpoint where they're going to do and get ready for it, so you got to be ready for everything which puts a lot in the minds of penalty killers."
The last time the two faced off against each other on Jan. 12, the Blackhawks come out on top with a 3-2 result and successfully killed all five of Colorado's power play opportunities.
In the loss against Arizona on Saturday night, the team struggled with giveaways that turned into scoring chances. Against a quick team like Colorado, they'll have to focus on keeping things simple and limit those turnover chances.
"We have to get pucks behind their [defense] and they have good offensive [defensemen] but we want to challenge them in their zone," Tinordi said. "We also have to put some pressure on them and limit our mistakes with turnovers. I think [that would be] huge because this team will thrive on turnovers [since they are a] fast and quick team."
