The Gap Nobody Talked About
The New York Rangers were supposed to finish with roughly 88 points. They got 77. That 10.8-point gap between expected and actual points was among the largest in the NHL this season, and yet the discourse around this team mostly settled on a simpler narrative: they were just bad. That's partially true. It's also incomplete. By CURSD's Luck Index, the Rangers graded out at -48, the second-most cursed team in the league behind only Vancouver. Everyone was busy writing the obituary. Almost nobody noticed the body was still twitching.
Pythagorean Purgatory
The Rangers scored 238 goals and allowed 250, a goal differential of minus-12. Not good, but not catastrophic. Run that through a Pythagorean model and you get an expected win percentage of .475, which over 82 games projects to something in the neighborhood of 87 to 88 points. That's a bubble team, not a 77-point team. The gap between New York's projected and actual point total, 10.8 points, is the kind of variance that typically corrects over time. But for the 2024-25 Rangers, there was no time left. The season simply ended before the math caught up.
A minus-12 goal differential is the résumé of a team that struggles. A 77-point finish is the résumé of a team that struggles and then gets mugged on the way home.
One-Goal Games: A Masterclass in Losing Close
This is where the curse lived. The Rangers went 11-21 in one-goal games, a winning percentage of .344 in contests decided by the thinnest possible margin. League-average teams tend to hover around .500 in these situations over time because one-goal games are, by definition, coin flips with skates on. Going 11-21 in them is the hockey equivalent of losing 21 out of 32 coin flips. It's possible. It's just deeply unlikely to reflect actual team quality.
Of the 32 one-goal decisions, 6 were overtime losses, giving New York an OTL rate of .188. The Rangers went 3-1 in shootouts, one of their few bright spots in close situations. But the shootout only accounts for a fraction of tight games. In the other 28 one-goal decisions settled in regulation or overtime proper, New York was 8-20. That is a staggering imbalance, and underlying metrics suggest it was driven more by timing and variance than by some fundamental inability to win tight hockey games.
Let's Be Honest: They Weren't Good Either
It would be dishonest to frame the 2024-25 Rangers as a secretly elite team buried under bad luck. They weren't. They allowed more goals than they scored. Their 2.9 goals per game ranked in the bottom half of the league. Their injury burden was relatively low at a grade of 3, meaning they can't lean on the "we were decimated" excuse. This was a flawed roster that underperformed its own modest expectations.
But "flawed" and "cursed" are not mutually exclusive. A team can be mediocre and still get kicked while it's down. The Rangers were both: not good enough to overcome their luck, and not lucky enough to mask their flaws. That's the cruelest quadrant on the grid.
What Regression Would Actually Look Like
If the Rangers brought back a similar roster and played another 82 games with the same underlying process, a minus-12 goal differential and a Pythagorean expectation of .475, the math says they'd land closer to 87 or 88 points. That's still probably not a playoff team in the Metropolitan Division, but it's a team in the conversation. It's a team that fires its coach in April instead of February.
The one-goal record would likely normalize toward .500, which alone would be worth roughly 8 to 10 additional points in the standings. The shootout record, already a small sample at 3-1, is essentially noise.
None of this guarantees a better 2025-26. Regression isn't a promise. But if you're the Rangers front office looking at this season's wreckage, the numbers suggest that roughly 11 points of your suffering was the hockey gods, not the hockey team. Whether that's a comfort or a taunt depends on your relationship with probability.