The New York Rangers went 11-21 in one-goal games this season. That is not a typo. That is not a split from some cursed November stretch. That is 82 games of evidence that when things got tight at Madison Square Garden, they broke the wrong way nearly every single time.
The Points They Left on the Ice
New York finished with 77 points on a 34-39-9 record. Their expected point total, derived from underlying shot and goal metrics, was 87.8. That 10.8-point gap is the largest negative delta in the NHL this season, earning the Rangers the top spot on the CURSD Luck Index at -45. For context, 87.8 points still wouldn't have made them a playoff team in the Metropolitan Division. But it would have made them a team that missed by a whisper instead of one that missed by a canyon.
The Pythagorean model, which estimates winning percentage based on goals scored and allowed, projected a .475 clip for the Rangers. That translates to roughly 39 wins over a full season. They managed 34. Five wins is an enormous amount of ground to lose to variance alone, or whatever you want to call a season that punished a team this consistently in the margins.
Close-Game Carnage
Only 34.4% of Rangers games this season were decided by a single goal, which is actually a below-average rate. The problem wasn't that they played too many close games. The problem was what happened when they did.
That 11-21 record in one-goal contests is staggering. League average in such games hovers near .500 over time, with some natural variance season to season. The Rangers were nowhere close. Their overtime loss rate of .188 further underscores the pattern: even in games that got to extra time, New York found ways to come out with the consolation point rather than the full two. They went 3-1 in shootouts, which is a small mercy, but four shootout decisions across an entire season is barely a rounding error.
Eleven wins in 32 one-goal games. That's a .344 winning percentage in the games that are supposed to be coin flips.
The Honest Part
Here is where the sympathy has to share space with honesty. The Rangers scored 238 goals and allowed 250, a goal differential of minus-12. That is 2.90 goals per game scored against 3.05 allowed. This is not a profile of a secretly dominant team that got jobbed by the hockey gods. This is a team that was outscored, full stop.
The injury burden data shows zero significant impact, meaning the Rangers can't point to a decimated lineup as the root cause. The roster that played is the roster that underwhelmed. Their underlying process, the actual ability to control play and generate more than they concede, was below average. The curse made a mediocre team look bad. It did not make a good team look mediocre.
That distinction matters.
What Regression Would Actually Look Like
If the Rangers ran this season back with the same roster, same goal differential, same everything except the bounces in close games, the math says they'd land somewhere around 87 to 88 points. That's a team in the wild card conversation, not necessarily in a wild card spot. It's the difference between being eliminated in March and sweating out the final week of the season.
A regression toward even a .450 winning percentage in one-goal games, still below league average, would have been worth roughly six additional points in the standings. The Rangers wouldn't need to become lucky. They'd just need to stop being historically unlucky.
Whether next season's roster gives them a better baseline is a question for management. But the variance debt the hockey gods owe this franchise is real, quantifiable, and sitting right there at 10.8 points. A team that was genuinely below average played like one of the worst in the league because every close game felt like reaching into a bag of marbles and pulling out the wrong color.
The Rangers were not good this year. They were also, by every measure we track, the unluckiest team in professional hockey.