Season 2 of PWHL looking significantly different than Year 1

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Two games (per team) into the 30-game schedule of Season 2 in the PWHL, and already trends are starting to develop.

The parity in the league is well beyond what it was in Year 1 with all six teams able to ice a team capable of winning against any other on any given night.

Here’s a look at some of the newer tendencies and trends we are seeing in the league in these early stages.

SPECIAL TEAMS MORE IMPORTANT

First it was the jailbreak rule introduced to encourage offence, even while a team was shorthanded. This season, teams had the incentive to produce even more offence when the league added the No Escape Rule, which forces a team to leave its remaining players on the ice at the time of an infraction for the next faceoff.

The combination of the two rule changes have taken the focus teams were already placing on special teams and multiplied it.

Through two games, the undefeated New York Sirens share the league lead with a power play operating at 40% success and a penalty kill unit that has yet to be scored on in five opportunities. The Sirens have scored eight goals this season, two of them with a player advantage and one short-handed for one of two Jailbreak goals in the league so far this season.

Winless Boston, by contrast, has just one power-play goal to show for two games, and has scored a total of just two goals this season.

It’s a real advantage for a team with a good power play, particularly in those opening moments of the player advantage when a team can be going up against an opponent without its set penalty kill unit out there, or worse, when a team gets stuck with three forwards and a lone defender after a penalty.

POWER LINES IN VOGUE

Look no further than the Sirens’ top trio of Alex Carpenter, Sarah Fillier and Jessie Eldridge as proof of what loading up one line can do for a team. The trio are 1-2-3 in league scoring and tearing things up with six goals and seven assists among them.

In Toronto, head coach Troy Ryan has opted to stay with Sarah Nurse between free agent signing Daryl Watts and Izzy Daniel, and that line has produced for him with three goals over two games.

In Boston, Hillary Knight was on a line with Alina Muller and rookie Hannah Bilka which was looking dangerous with two goals but now may be without Muller after Boston’s leading scorer from Year 1 had to leave Wednesday’s game following a vicious hit to her head by Minnesota defender Maggie Flaherty.

Ottawa’s big line has yet to be identified with Brianne Jenner not in the lineup for the first two games. Whether head coach Carla MacLeod simply replaced Watts spot on last year’s top line with Tereza Vanisova, who is off to a great start, or goes a different direction, she certainly has the option to load up a line that will be the focus of every opponent’s scout.

And don’t sleep on Montreal and the defending champs from Minnesota. Marie-Philip Poulin, Laura Stacey and Lina Ljungblom are just starting to find some cohesion in La Belle Province, while in Minnesota, head coach Ken Klee is so far resisting putting all his top gunners on one line, but it’s still early.

ROOKIES ARE PRODUCING

There’s a reason Fillier was a consensus first-overall pick long before the draft began. Everyone knew the Princeton grad and young veteran of three world championships and two Olympics for Canada would be putting up numbers right out of the game. Through two games Fillier, the Georgetown, Ont., native has a league-best five points on two goals and three assists playing on New York’s top line.

She’s not the only newcomer turning heads. Dominique Petrie, a former Clarkson and Harvard standout, was a fifth-round pick by the Frost and is already paying dividends with two goals in two games.

Montreal wasn’t sure if defender Cayla Barnes, its first-round pick in the draft, would be ready to start the season after she was injured in the Rivalry Series. But Barnes got penciled in and didn’t disappoint, with a goal and an assist in the first two games for the Ohio State defender.

In Toronto, Daniel, a third-round pick, already has her first goal and is looking more and more comfortable with each passing shift on a line with Nurse and Watts.

mganter@postmedia.com