Quote:
Originally Posted by Cube Inmate
I'll discount "bad luck" instantly. In hockey, you can maybe call it bad luck if your puck hits a rut and flips off your blade...if a dump-in takes an 80° bounce of a stanchion and into your net...if you're skating backwards and step on an Oilers jersey that's been tossed.
But what many are calling "bad luck" is no such thing. It's poor execution caused by poor skills or poor decisions (the latter of these being what we might call "systems"). Low shooting percentage over 82 games is caused by taking poor shots. Letting in "pinball" type goals is caused by allowing the shooting lanes to clog up and not letting your goalie see the shot.
An event of pure "luck" might change the outcome of one game, or even one series. But there's no argument that over 82 games a team could be "unlucky" enough to drop 10 or 20 points from their expectation. It's a lazy excuse to say that. The only way you could argue that (bad) luck could have that kind of effect would be if a team lost its franchise player due to an unlucky injury, but then we say it's injuries causing the failure, not luck.
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Disagree.
The league if full of players and with that teams that have seasons where everything goes in followed by seasons where nothing does.
It's the reason I (and others) kept stating Oshi would be a terrible free agent signing (23% shooting with 33 goals, back to career average 13% this year) and why William Karlsson (24% this year) is going to make the Knights look foolish this summer ... unsustainable shooting percentage.
When things go up they usually go down.
When things go down they either come back up or said player has hit a wall and it's over.
The Flames are young so their down players probably bounce back to some degree, and all I'm saying is it would be wise to do a deep dive on those matters before you make a rash decision.