Today, come check out how the 2023-24 Devils fared in terms of luck. Based on five different metrics, were they lucky or unlucky?
Welcome to my yearly post about luck! Each year, I like to take a look at how lucky or unlucky the New Jersey Devils were in the regular season. Of course, luck is a somewhat subjective phenomenon, so it isn’t something that can be completely quantifiable via numbers and statistics. Perspective will change your opinion on who is lucky or not. For example, we as Devils fans might think the Rangers were lucky just to make it to the Conference Finals this year given their goaltender essentially carried them. However, Rangers fans might think they were unlucky given they were only two games from a Stanley Cup Finals appearance and were the President’s Trophy winners.
Despite that, it is still fun to try to define luck in some terms and see if teams were lucky or unlucky. Rob Vollman did this in his Hockey Abstract years ago, and I like to use his formula, which I think is a good one. Vollman’s method for quantifying luck boiled down to 5 different statistics, which when added together, can give a broad view of how lucky or unlucky a team was. They are PDO, Special Teams Impact, injuries as measured by CHIP, record in post-regulation games, and record in one-goal games. Let’s take a look at each one.
PDO
PDO is perhaps the easiest one of the five to visually see, as it is a statistic regularly tracked by any hockey statistics and analytics website and is a stat that symbolizes luck. It might not be the entire picture, but it is a luck stat. Simply put, it is the combination of a team’s shooting and save percentages at 5 on 5. When added together, luck-neutral teams should have a PDO around 1.00. Anything significantly under that and a team was unlucky, either snakebitten or without even replacement-level goaltending play. On the other hand, anything significantly over 1.00 and a team might expect to come back down to earth next year with more realistic shooting or save percentage numbers. Of course, some of that could be skill. The aforementioned Shesterkin will always boost NYR’s PDO simply with his strong save percentage, but he is arguably the best goaltender in the world, so that is skill-based. Nonetheless, PDO still paints a decent picture of luck overall.
This past season, according to Natural Stat Trick, the Devils were one of the unluckier teams in the NHL in terms of PDO. They ranked 25th in the league with a PDO of 0.994. Only seven teams had worse PDO numbers than NJ did. Relatively speaking, the Devils actually had a pretty strong 5v5 shooting percentage at 9.06% which ranked 10th in the league, but their .9038 save percentage was abysmal, ranking 28th. Again, you might want to claim that save percentage was wholly deserved given how bad Vitek Vanecek is, but it is just one piece of the luck puzzle here. In terms of PDO, the Devils were unlucky.
Special Teams Impact
Special Teams Impact works similarly to PDO as it takes two stats and combines them to give an idea of luck. But whereas PDO is a luck stat for 5 on 5 play, Special Teams Impact works for unbalanced situations. It takes a team’s power play and penalty kill percentages and combines them. The closer a team was to 100%, the more luck-neutral they were in these situations.
This past season, after a scorching hot start to the season on the power play, the Devils ended with the 13th-best power play unit in the league with a 22.5% success rate. This was coupled with an 80.7% success rate on the penalty kill, ranking 11th in the league. Combine those, and the Devils’ STI was 103.2%, a definitively lucky number. That makes sense given their league rankings too, as I feel like it hasn’t been too often in the last 15 years where the Devils rank in the top half of the league in both power play and penalty kill. Whereas they were unlucky at 5 on 5, they were quite fortunate on special teams. Of course, the majority of each game is at 5 on 5, so if you want to be lucky anywhere, you’d rather it be at 5 on 5. Nonetheless, special teams were a net positive for the Devils in terms of luck.
CHIP
Here we have the most interesting stat of the bunch, at least in my opinion. CHIP stands for the Cap Hit of Injured Players. Whereas it would be a lot easier to simply count the number of man games lost to injury, that would not tell the whole tale. Losing Jack Hughes or Dougie Hamilton to injury is a lot more important than losing someone like Tomas Nosek. So to showcase that difference, we measure the time lost in terms of cap hit. Losing Hamilton’s $9 million cap hit is a much bigger impact than losing Nosek’s $! million. Now, for a team like the Devils, this isn’t perfect either. Losing Luke Hughes or Simon Nemec would’ve been a big deal this season, and they are on their rookie deals and make minimal, so their loss would not be accurately portrayed in CHIP. However, this is the best we can do in terms of quantifying the luck impact of injuries, so let’s roll with it.
To find this info, we go to the NHL Injury Viz. They have awesome visuals to showcase the impact of injuries on teams. Their charts and graphs are too big for me to screenshot and post here, so please check out the link. Overall, it shows that the Devils were unlucky when it came to injuries, with a total CHIP of $15.85 million. Only four teams were unluckier when it came to injuries this season. And there is a pretty sizable dropoff after the Devils too, with the next team on the list having a CHIP of $14.07 million, so they really were not lucky here. The main reason for this, as you can probably guess, is the absence of Dougie Hamilton for the majority of the season. His large cap hit against the team contributed to a large CHIP for the Devils, and the Devils had the largest CHIP when you only look at defensemen, sitting at $8.6 million. However, their CHIP for forwards isn’t small either at $6.64 million, it is larger than the entire CHIP of 10 teams, so the injury losses from forwards added up too. There is no doubt that from looking at this, the Devils were distinctly unlucky with injuries.
Post-Regulation Record
Next, we will take a look at the team’s record in games that went beyond regulation, so both overtime and shootout games. Whether the game ended in overtime or went to a shootout, the idea here is that a luck-neutral team would be around .500 in these games. The luck especially comes in with the shootout, where it is a crap shoot as to which team is going to win. You can argue some more skill is required in 3 on 3, but given the amount of breakaways and odd-man rushes that can occur on a whim leading to killer scoring chances, a lot of that is luck too.
This past season, the Devils played in 10 games that went beyond regulation. In those 10 games, they were a neat 5-5, exactly luck neutral. They were fairly lucky early on with some overtime and shootout wins early, and then the losses piled on later on to even out the luck here. Overall, this was an area where the team was luck-neutral.
One-Goal Games
Finally, similar to the last one, we look at games that ended in regulation but were decided by only one goal. Again, like with shootouts, this is not entirely luck-based, as many factors can go into a one-goal game. Maybe the Devils were up big and played defense, but the opponent got a late goal with an empty net to make it a one-goal game late. That isn’t a game where one tip-in changes things quite like a tie game, but nonetheless, it all gets lumped in here. In a full 60-minute game, one goal can often be the result of luck. The way a puck bounces, how it just misses a stick and moves unexpectedly, how it happens to bounce off of a goaltender, or whatnot. You name it, there are a million scenarios where something just works out and leads to a goal that could win a tight game. So, realistically, a luck-neutral team would have a record around .500 in one-goal games, as sometimes the puck bounced their way for that game-winning goal, and sometimes it went against them.
This past season, the Devils were 10-8 in one-goal games that ended in regulation, which is fairly luck-neutral when all is said and done. If one of those wins turned into a loss, they would have been perfectly luck-neutral, so you could say they were ever so slightly lucky in this regard, but I think a 10-8 record in these games is pretty close to neutral, and I definitely wouldn’t say it’s super lucky. So overall, in this category, I have to say that the Devils were luck-neutral.
Conclusion
Now that we have all of the info for each category, let’s throw it all together and paint the picture. The only area where the Devils were truly lucky was with Special Teams Impact. They were luck-neutral with post-regulation and one-goal games, and were decidedly unlucky with PDO and CHIP. One lucky stat, two unlucky stats, and two neutral stats.
Overall, that would be enough to call the 2023-24 Devils slightly unlucky. I wouldn’t say they were massively unlucky, but they definitely were not a lucky team this past season. The main killer for this team in terms of luck was injuries, with the extended loss of Hamilton and the menagerie of forward injuries throughout the season. And remember guys like Timo Meier, who was most certainly affected by an injury, do not count against the CHIP as they played through it. So really, injuries were the dooming factor here with luck. Yes PDO was in the red, and it led to the Devils being unlucky at 5 on 5, but it was not prohibitively so. The injuries, however, were the killer. So to sum it up, according to Rob Vollman’s metric to determine luck, the Devils were slightly unlucky this year.
What do you think about this? Do you agree that the Devils were slightly unlucky this year? How do you feel about determining luck using this method? Please leave your comments below, and thanks for reading!