The Brooklyn Nets finished 5.80 expected points below where their underlying numbers said they should have been. That was the single largest negative luck gap across both the NBA and NHL regular seasons. The standings buried it. The data did not.
With both leagues now in their postseasons and MLB settling into its early-season rhythms, this is the moment to look back at the full regular-season ledger and ask a simple question: which teams were genuinely that good, and which ones just ran into variance they couldn't outrun?
Due a Correction
The three NBA clubs sitting deepest below their expected outputs all share a familiar profile: their process metrics suggested something meaningfully better than what the win column showed.
Brooklyn Nets (Luck Index: -68, xPoints gap: -5.80) No team in the league wore worse fortune more consistently. A -68 Luck Index is the kind of figure that, in a retroactive study, almost always accompanies a team that lost a disproportionate share of close games. Brooklyn's actual record diverged from their expected output by 5.80 points, the widest gap on our board. Their season is over, but this number has shelf life. Bookmakers pricing Brooklyn's offseason moves and early 2026-27 lines tend to anchor on final standings rather than underlying quality. The gap between perception and process is where market inefficiency lives.
Sacramento Kings (Luck Index: -51, xPoints gap: -4.30) Sacramento's 4.30-point shortfall suggests a team that was roughly two wins worse than its underlying performance deserved. The Kings' season ended quietly, but their shot quality and defensive metrics told a more competitive story than their record. A Luck Index of -51 puts them in the bottom tier of variance victims leaguewide.
Utah Jazz (Luck Index: -49, xPoints gap: -5.60) Utah's gap of 5.60 expected points is nearly as severe as Brooklyn's, though their Luck Index was slightly less extreme at -49. Translation: the Jazz were both unlucky and perhaps slightly worse in true talent than the Nets, but still meaningfully better than their final record.
Three teams. Three records that lied a little.
Living on Borrowed Luck
The NHL's overperformers present a trickier puzzle, because some of them are still playing.
Buffalo Sabres (Luck Index: 70, xPoints gap: +0.40) A Luck Index of 70 is the highest on either board, yet Buffalo's expected points gap was a modest 0.40. That combination suggests the Sabres didn't dramatically outperform their expected standings total, but the underlying game-level variance broke heavily in their favor throughout the season. The how matters more than the what here. Teams that consistently win the coin-flip moments tend to stop winning them.
Montréal Canadiens (Luck Index: 64, xPoints gap: +4.40) The Canadiens' 4.40-point gap is the most straightforward overperformance on this list. Montreal finished roughly two wins above where the expected points model placed them. A Luck Index of 64 confirms the direction. Variance like this typically regresses, and in a playoff series where the sample is only four to seven games, it can correct fast.
Boston Bruins (Luck Index: 56, xPoints gap: -0.10) Boston is the oddity. Their expected points gap is essentially zero, yet the Luck Index sits at 56, indicating that game-level luck ran notably in their favor even as the season-long points total came out roughly neutral. The Bruins' fortune was real but hidden inside the structure of their wins and losses rather than the raw total.
The Regression Window
In the NBA and NHL playoffs, regression doesn't need 20 games to show up. A seven-game series is a brutally small sample, and teams riding positive variance can see it evaporate in a single overtime loss. Historically, clubs with regular-season Luck Indexes above 55 have seen their playoff series margins tighten compared to what regular-season records would predict. The gap doesn't guarantee a collapse. It guarantees that the market's assumptions are built on noisier data than they appear.
The numbers don't pick sides. They just keep score.