Kukla's Korner Hockey

Kukla's Korner Hockey

Why The LA Kings Are Not In The Playoffs

04/10/2015 at 12:28pm EDT

The Calgary Flames and Winnipeg Jets are going to the postseason. What happened to the Kings? Hudler, Pavelec, Hammond, Habs defence and more in Scott Cullen’s Statistically Speaking.

KINGS DE-THRONED

After losing 3-1 in Calgary Thursday, the Kings are the first Stanley Cup champion to miss the next year’s playoffs since 2006-2007 Carolina Hurricanes.

The thing is, it’s not like the Kings collapsed. They were the league’s top possession club (getting 54.9% of score-adjusted shot attempts) and still have the 13th-best goal differential (+0.22 per game), which is better than three playoff teams (Anaheim, Detroit and Vancouver).

How does a team with those underlying numbers still end up on the outside looking in at the playoffs?

For starters, the Kings were 2-8 in shootouts and 1-7 in overtime games. Given the randomness involved in shootout results, that’s basically coming out on the wrong end of coin flips. 3-15 in overtime and shootout games, after going 12-8 the year before, is enough in tightly-contested standings, to come up short. Records in one-goal games tend to be unsustainable, but there's enough of them in hockey that they make a huge difference in the standings.

continue plus more topics from the games last night at TSN...

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Paul Kukla founded Kukla’s Korner in 2005 and the site has since become the must-read site on the ‘net for all the latest happenings around the NHL.

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