Just how lucky are the New York Rangers this season?

The New York Rangers have dropped three consecutive games by a combined score of 12-5. Following a strong stretch, the team has seemingly found its level again.

In any sport with an extremely long season, teams a prone to going on long runs of both positive or negative play. In the National Hockey League, the 82 game season presents a marathon to its 31 franchises. Through two months of the 2018-2019 season, the New York Rangers have exhibited this ebb and flow to nearly precision.

Two weeks ago, the team was in the midst of nine wins in 11 games stretch including the first win against the New York Islanders in more than two years. Things were going swimmingly and the Rangers were in first place in the Metropolitan Division. However, the wheels came off in a thorough stomping at the hands of the Ottawa Senators.

Since that 3-0 shutout loss to Ottawa, New York has struggled in every phase of the game. The combination of a struggling offense with a duct taped together defense has resulted in three straight losses. The most demoralizing being the 4-3 shootout loss to the Winnipeg Jets in which the Rangers blew a three-goal lead.

While quantifying luck is not the most straightforward thing, there is a reliable formula that’s a good indicator of whether a team’s success is for real or smoke and mirrors. PDO is a stat that is a measure of a team’s luck stats. By adding together a team’s shooting percentage with its save percentage, it paints a picture of how fortunate puck bounces are for that particular group.

A perfectly balanced team that isn’t lucky or unlucky has a PDO 0f 100% because the league average for shooting percentage is nine percent and the average save percentage is .910. A team over 100 is considered lucky and one below is rather unfortunate.

The dry spell

So, starting with the three-game losing streak, we can begin to get an idea as to whether or not the Rangers are actually this bad. First, the game against Ottawa is going to be a little wonky because New York was shut out in the game. The team’s shooting percentage was obviously zero percent, added to the .912 save percentage and it’s clear that the Rangers were extremely unlucky.

A .912 PDO is abysmal, however, it’s important to note the context of the sample size. Given more games, the number starts to come back to the realm of realism. Against Montreal, the number was closer to 100, but still pretty unlucky. The team scored two goals on 22 shots for a .09 shooting percentage, added to the .878 save percentage and its another ugly result.

Lastly, against Winnipeg, the Rangers resembled a competent hockey team and its PDO was an indicator of that. The team scored three goals on 19 shots and Henrik Lundqvist had a .929 save percentage. Added together and New York has a PDO of 100.7, a number that indicates a relatively stable and neither luckiness or unluckiness.

Using the three-game stretch as a sample size, New York had a PDO of 95.97, well below the average of 100 and indicating that it was a particularly unlucky stretch.

Big picture

Now, being that the Rangers have lost three straight games, their PDO is naturally going to be lower than it would have if the team had won. In the grand scheme of things, New York’s PDO on the season is 100.3, which has taken a hit based on two of the team’s last three games.

Compared to the rest of the league, New York sits at 15th in the entire league in terms of PDO which seems about right for the team’s record and talent. As a group that is reliant upon intangibles to win most nights is going to rely on more high percentage plays to win than a more talented team.

Players with more high-end talent have more freedom to take higher risks in their attempts to score a goal. New York, on the other hand, will try to operate within its system to create better scoring chances to make up for lack of game-breaking talent.

As illogical as it sounds, hockey is a sport played on ice with a bouncing disc-shaped piece of rubber. Bounces happen, pucks hit sticks, body parts, the boards and glass meaning that it can really end up anywhere. For every lucky goal that goes in, shooting percentage goes up, every bad bounce in a save percentage goes down.