The Coyotes won their fourth game in their past five, after beating the LA Kings 3-0 in the most boring hockey game I've ever had the pleasure to watch.
With the victory they moved into sixth place in the overall NHL standings.
It's quite the accomplishment of the recently extended GM John Chayka, although it is way too early to start thinking of the Coyotes as a contender.
They definitely can contend if their goalies continue to stop 94% of shots, but how likely is that?
Well, yesterday someone tried to tell me the Islanders have a better roster than the Leafs, so apparently we don't care about things like "analysis" and the standings are an exact representation of how good teams actually are.
Then again, for those of us who stuck with Math beyond grade nine, there should be some basic understanding about the randomness of results.
Don't get me wrong - it's fun as hell when your team wins, I just think we should all have an interest in whether or not the teams we like will keep winning.
A good way to find out is to look at PDO - combined save and shooting percentage.
The NHL's top teams via the standings: Washington, Islanders, Boston, Blues, Oilers, Coyotes, Avs, Montreal.
We've got five matching teams (Montreal, NYI, Boston, Colorado and Arizona) and I think it makes sense that Washington, St. Louis and Edmonton are a bit more "for real" than the rest of these teams.
The Caps and Blues have some of the highest quantities of first-line level players in the NHL, while the Oilers (arguably) have the two best players.
(Interesting what years of losing will do for you: no one believes in the Oilers, but people love the Bruins, despite fairly similar make-ups to their rosters. Though I'd bet on Rask over Smith or Koskinen).
The Bruins are an interesting case study, as they have the best line in hockey, but sort of a lousy roster after that. That might be all you need though. Of the five teams who make both lists, the Bruins are the only one without a top five save percentage.
In the 12 seasons before this one, exactly one NHL team out of 362 has finished the season with a save percentage over 94% (Boston, the year they won the Cup).
The Islanders have already dropped below that threshold, and the Coyotes probably will too. Every year though, there are a couple teams that get 93%.
Those teams are extremely lucky (otherwise it would likely be the same teams all the time, but it's not) but they usually finish the season near the top of the standings.
So the odds aren't too bad for the Coyotes, Islanders, Habs, Avs and Bruins. Whether or not any of those teams (other than Colorado, and maybe Boston) have the kind of roster you want to work towards (like Washington or Tampa) to be an annual contender may be besides the point.
The one thing no hockey fan really likes admitting is that whoever has the best goalie usually wins, and that it's next to impossible to figure out who has the best goalie.
Like, hands up if you thought it was gonna be Tomas Greiss and Darcy Kuemper?
People tend to get really touchy when you say their team is getting lucky, but why? In a professional league, there is next to no difference between non-star players and everyone else (including the next 200 best guys who aren't even in the NHL).
Add in a salary cap and the parity goes nuts. Then add in the fact that we love a sport where one players has a significantly ridiculous amount of weight in deciding the outcomes (goalie) and that that is the most unpredictable of all players.
So of course injuries and the randomness of goalies will have the biggest effect on the standings. Unless you're going to play a 200 game season with best of 21 playoff series, that's always going to be the case.
And while it makes everyone mad if you don't pretend their personal favorite team is a powerhouse destined to win annually, the fact is, the unpredictability is what makes hockey fun.
In the NBA, even a casual fan could predict the top five teams in the standings with some degree of accuracy.
In the NHL, good luck with that.
NHL favorites going into the season: Toronto, San Jose, Vegas, Flames, Blues, Lightning, Bruins, Capitals.
Three of those teams are doing well?
No one tell any Islanders fans that if you flip nine heads in a row, there's still a 50% chance the next flip is heads.
That's a joke by the way, calm down! The Coyotes and the Islanders are demonstrably getting lucky right now, but what's so bad about that?
I can think of a time when the Coyotes were better than they are now but weren't getting such good results. It was not as much fun as this year has been.
94% goaltending? You literally wouldn't trade it for Connor McDavid (if you knew it would last).
But since Tomas Greiss isn't getting traded for McDavid any time soon, I think that on some level, we all know this stuff.
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