We all know the saying: Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.
That’s not entirely true, of course — true talent often triumphs over enough time. The problem is that last part — for short stretches, a bounce here and there can make a lot of difference in a team’s record.
In hockey, a low-scoring game where finding the net can come down to inches, those bounces can be even more exaggerated. For those who aren’t into fancy stats, puck luck tends to be expressed with a catch-all of PDO, which is a team’s shooting percentage added to a team’s save percentage. Teams that are further away from 100.0 (or 1000 for those who hate decimals) tend to be the ones who have been most affected by luck, or so the wisdom goes.
That’s because there tends to be a lot of fluctuation in shooting percentage and goaltending. Not every player is created equal of course — Sidney Crosby is going to shoot better than Nikolai Kulemin — but no team is made up of Crosbys, and the play of most goaltenders fluctuates more than you’d think.
PDO is simplistic, but effective. Most teams tend not to consistently deviate far from that 100.0 mark.
This doesn’t mean a team can’t be “lucky” for a full year. Every season, multiple teams are and have successful campaigns. It also doesn’t mean a lucky team is a bad team. A good team can have good bounces as well.
All we’re talking about with luck is whether a team’s results are better or worse than you’d expect given the baseline their possession numbers suggest.
So without further ado, let’s look at some of the luckier squads in the league and what they'll have to do to keep it going.
(All Fenwick and PDO numbers from stats.hockeyanalysis.com)
Maple Leafs
Hey, we’ve seen this before, haven’t we?
For what it’s worth, this isn’t quite the same as last year, or at least how last year finished. The Leafs, in the first wild card spot as of Monday, finished with a 42.3 Fenwick For last season, which was the worst in the league. In close situations, it was even worse at 41.6 FF.
This year? The Leafs are at a 46.7 FF close (24th) and 46.1 overall. In other words, the Leafs are still not good, but they’re better than last year.
However, the Leafs lead the league in shooting percentage at 5v5 and have the third highest PDO in league in those situations. Regression doesn’t always happen, but betting against it isn't smart. Jonathan Bernier and James Reimer make for a solid tandem, but they did last year, too. We all know how that turned out.
Flames
I wrote about the Flames a few weeks ago and said that they could do what the Avalanche did in 2013-14 — survive on shooting percentage and goaltending. Naturally, Calgary went into the toilet. Since Dec, 6, the Flames are 0-7-1, with losses to the Rangers, Leafs and Sabres. All three are in the bottom half of the league in Fenwick For percentage.
Jonas Hiller still has been pretty good, with a .931 even-strength save percentage. But Calgary’s shooting percentage has gone from 9.12 percent to 8.56 percent in the matter of a few weeks. You can’t win if you can’t score, and over the Flames’ poor stretch, they’ve scored three goals just once — a 4-3 loss to the Sabres. They’ve managed two goals only three times, and have scored just once four times.
In other words, Hiller would have needed to be almost perfect for the Flames to have done any better in this stretch. And while Hiller is good, his name isn’t “Hasek.”
Rangers
Winners of six straight coming into Monday, the Rangers have feasted on the bottom of the NHL, scoring wins over the Flames, Oilers and a pair of Ws against the Hurricanes, though the streak started with wins over the (depleted) Penguins and a trouncing of a good Canucks team. Credit where credit is due: We’ve seen plenty of times where teams fail to beat who they “should”, including by this Rangers team earlier in the year.
With that said, the Rangers have a 101.7 PDO at 5v5, which is right with the Leafs (fourth-best in the league). But since PDO is shooting percentage and goaltending, Henrik Lundqvist could just be performing his royal duties, right?
Lundqvist has been good — a .925 even-strength save percentage is solid — and Cam Talbot has been even better in his small sample (.933 even-strength save percentage in eight games). But the Rangers are where they are because only Toronto is shooting it better right now. The Rangers’ shooting percentage sits at 9.46 percent. The third-place team, the Lightning, are at 8.87.
The Rangers have some room for improvement with their puck-possession — Derek Stepan, Martin St. Louis and Ryan McDonagh all have been negative Corsi players this year — but what they’ve been getting now is unsustainable. If the Rangers don’t get better play from top players not named Rick Nash, this high point could be equaled by a low point fairly soon.
Canadiens
The Canadiens have the third-best record in the Eastern Conference. They have the 19th best Fenwick For at 5v5 at 50.0. They’re slightly better at 50.5 in 5v5 close situations, but the Canadiens also have a PDO of 101.5, which is sixth-best in the league. Sensing a common theme?
This is where the caveat comes in. Carey Price had a .934 even-strength save percentage last year. It is .932 this season. Price has emerged as one of the league’s best goalies, which gives the Habs a bit more leeway. Have a great goalie is a huge help.
Of course, they shot 7.44 percent in 5v5 situations last year. This year, they’re shooting at 8.66 percent. The true talent is probably somewhere in the middle.
Still, even with regression, the Habs are good enough to find themselves in a playoff spot this spring, largely because they play in the Eastern Conference. Things would be dicier if they played in the West.
Predators
No matter how many caveats are thrown in, there’s often the sense when you say a team is “having good luck,” it’s code for saying that team isn’t that good. But that’s not always the case. The two best teams in PDO are the Penguins and Predators. We know the Penguins are a good team, so long as they have Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin.
As for the Predators, they rank fifth in FF in 5v5 situations at 53.3. In close situations they’re worse, but still a solid seventh at 52.8. And they’re shooting percentage is 8.02 in all 5v5 situations and an extremely “meh” 7.33 in close situations.
The Predators are living well on Pekka Rinne’s bounce back campaign. Of starting goalies (we’ll say guys with at least 20 games at this point) Rinne’s .943 even-strength save percentage is by far the best. (By the way, Marc-Andre Fleury is second at .938)
That won’t last, but Rinne has been well above-average before. In the five seasons prior to last year’s injury-riddled disaster, Rinne never had an even-strength save percentage below .925. Barry Trotz’s defensive system helped, but Rinne is just a pretty solid goalie.
Good luck is just adding to a solid foundation in Nashville. The biggest problem for the Predators is they play in the West, which means if their luck turns, they could quickly drop in the standings.