The Utah Mammoth have the second-best power play unit in the entire NHL, having an extremely effective offense on the power play.
However, the penalty kill has been the opposite in effectiveness. Things continued to go south for the PK unit as Utah lost 3-1.
The Mammoth PK just hasn't been good - and it isn't improving
Last night, Utah played sloppily. The Mammoth committed seven penalties, which obviously led to some power-play goals for the Minnesota Wild.
The Wild had seven power plays and scored two goals. The game stayed close until the Wild scored two PP goals to take a 2-0 lead. The Mammoth offense didn't execute well enough to keep up and eventually lost 3-1.
The loss continued to expose the PK unit's weakness. Of course, it isn't fair for Utah to commit that many penalties, but 2 of 7 still allows a goal roughly 28% of the time on the power play. The defense simply has to get better and actually give the Mammoth an advantage.
Scoring a lot of PP goals is nice, but allowing a ton of them at the same time is counterproductive. Utah's No. 1 area for improvement moving forward is defense overall, especially the PK unit. Moving forward, the offense needs to score more than one goal and avoid going 0/4 on the PP, but defense has been the team's biggest concern for a while.
The Mammoth have a good opportunity to bounce back by taking down the Pittsburgh Penguins on Thursday night, a team they recently defeated at home.
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