I get the saying behind puck luck but skating thru life hoping on luck to get you thru it is not sustainable.
All players need to will it.
We've have been complaining about bad puck luck forever now. No more excuses.
That's not how hockey works. Puck luck is a very real thing. Goals are statistically random or "noisy" events. Over the course of a season, the rate of scoring from certain areas tends to even out for any particular player (and even that isn't totally true). That is why advanced statisticians the look at things like shot quality and scoring chances instead of goals. The goals are fluky and unpredictable. The shot events are not.
Auston Matthews has a career shooting percentage of around 16.5%. So, only 1 in every 6 shots he takes becomes a goal. Whether any particular shot becomes a goal is a random event. Even for the league's best goal scorer, the chances of scoring are small. This isn't basketball.
Because there are a relatively low number of scoring attempts in any particular game (i.e., small-ish sample size), it is possible in a particular game for the random outcome of goals to deviate significantly from the expected outcome. Last night, the Sabres had bad puck luck. They scored fewer goals than you would expect given the shots and chances they had. I think that was obvious from the eye test.
[By the way, I'm sure you know all this already. I don't mean to be didactic. But all the doom and gloom in this thread is a bit over the top. They played well last night at 5v5 and had shit luck. (The PP is a different story)
I don’t know who can watch these top six forwards play the last three games and say it’s some mystical puck luck and not a complete lack of finishing talent. The Cozens line is a disaster. Full stop. No luck involved. Tage hasn’t hit a net on purpose all year. Greenway interfered with a goalie in Europe and he got a lucky goal. His only one. Tuch is catching his own rebound away from full incompetence out there. Shit..I’d say his goal was luck too. Benson actually did get unlucky because time ran out and I’m not even sure the puck luck stats count it because it didn’t happen in the course of the game clock.
So who is getting so unlucky? McLeod, Greenway, Krebs and the 4th line?
I’ve got news for you. They aren’t unlucky. This is who they’ve always been. Something isn’t luck when it’s happening for years and years.
You know whats luck? Dylan Cozens shooting 14.7 percent in a contract year.
That’s luck
Jim Fox (Kings' color commentator) had a good point last night. Once it became clear that Kuemper was having a great game and was so positionally sound (and huge), the Sabres started trying even more than usual to pick corners and edges, which is what led to all the posts and shots going wide. So, basically, it was a product of Kuemper being a wall.