The saying is you got to be good to be lucky.
Leafs just ain’t good enough yet. They showed improvements and I think they could have beaten any teams if the playoffs start again today. But the question will always be can they do it? So far, they can’t. Hopefully that change next season.
That proverb only goes so far, and the entire idea of it (same with "creating your own luck") is that your actions can put you in the best positions to have success (or otherwise increase your probability of having success).
These are three examples that I was always told in school when that topic came up (hyperbolized to prove a point):
If you have a 99.999% chance of not dying when you get into a car because you are doing everything feasibly possible to be safe while in a motor vehicle. Do you consider yourself "lucky" every time you get into a car and survive even though you only had a 0.001% chance of dying? Or unlucky if that one time happened?
There are two students preparing for a test where it is impossible for you to know how to solve 100% of the potential questions on said test. One student prepared hard and know how to solve 90% of the questions, whereas another student totally slacked off and can maybe solve 10%. When the test occurred, it turns out that all of the questions are within the 10% that the slacker knew and in the 10% that the diligent student did not know. Slacker passes, diligent student fails. One was seemingly more prepared than the other, yet the results don't show it. If you are to do that test again with a different subset of questions from the same population, would you rather be the slacker or the diligent student if you wanted to pass?
Finally, you have the best shot at winning the draft lottery at 20%. However, that still means you have an 80% chance of losing. Do you considering yourself lucky, as a team that had less of a chance to win than to lose? Or not because you had the best chance and all other teams also had a greater chance of losing than winning? Would you want to be the team with the best odds if the lottery was done again?
Results do have some importance, especially in cases where the probability may be uncertain and results can change the actual belief of probability, but they do not wildly make things swing... Even in the case of 6 straight losses. Because I can assure you that if the Leafs have won in any of these last few series (especially the last 2, but possibly even a couple before it), nobody would be saying we were "not good" or "lucky" like is being said about the Oilers or Habs last year. And that is because we are a good team and a team that absolutely looks and can be competitive even if the raw results do not perfectly reflect it as such.
