The Brooklyn Nets, Washington Wizards, Vancouver Canucks, New York Mets, and New York Rangers have almost nothing in common. They play different sports in different cities under different rules, and most of them would rather not be grouped together at all. But they share one quiet humiliation: the underlying numbers suggest they deserved better than what the scoreboard gave them. Across the NBA, NHL, and MLB, these five clubs posted the widest gaps between expected and actual performance, according to our weekly Luck Index. The math isn't kind to their records. The results were worse.
1. Brooklyn Nets - NBA
The Nets finished 20-62. That record looks like a team that was outclassed nightly, and some nights it was. But Brooklyn's Pythagorean win projection, based on points scored and allowed across 82 games, pegs them closer to a 26-win team. Six wins is a meaningful gap. It is the difference between a historically bad season and a merely terrible one.
Brooklyn's Luck Index of -63 is the worst in our cross-sport database this week. The culprit, as usual, was close games. The Nets were miserable in clutch situations, losing contests that their overall scoring margins said should have split closer to even. They didn't lack talent so much as they lacked the coin-flip bounces that separate a bottom-five team from a bottom-three one.
Small comfort, but comfort nonetheless.
2. Washington Wizards - NBA
Washington went 17-65, the worst record in the league. Their Pythagorean projection says roughly 23 wins. That six-win gap mirrors Brooklyn's almost exactly, though the Wizards' Luck Index sits at -53, slightly less cursed in relative terms because the baseline was already so low.
The Wizards were outscored by a lot, which is why even the forgiving Pythagorean model only bumps them to 23 wins. But the pattern holds: in games decided by five points or fewer, Washington found the losing side with eerie consistency. Regression to the mean is supposed to be a law, not a suggestion. Washington's season was a 65-game counterargument.
3. Vancouver Canucks - NHL
Vancouver's 25-49 record ended their season well before the playoffs, but expected goals luck tells a slightly different story. The Canucks' Pythagorean projection, calculated from goals for and against, lands around 26 wins. That is a modest one-win gap, but their Luck Index of -52 reflects a broader pattern: Vancouver consistently underperformed their expected goals models at 5-on-5, converting chances at a rate that defied their shot quality.
The Canucks generated enough high-danger opportunities to project as a team hovering near .500 in stretches of the season. They did not hover near .500 in any stretch of the season. Their save percentage at even strength sagged below league average for most of the year, compounding the finishing variance that dragged their record south.
4. New York Mets - MLB
The Mets sit at 29-36 through 65 games. Their Pythagorean record says 32-33, a three-win gap that looks modest until you consider what it means in a pennant race: the difference between a team treading water and one that is starting to sink.
New York's run differential is not pretty, but it is meaningfully less ugly than their win-loss record implies. The Mets have lost 11 one-run games against seven wins, a split that has drained roughly two wins from their ledger on its own. There is still time for this one to correct. Whether the Mets have the pitching depth to benefit from that correction is a separate, less mathematical question.
5. New York Rangers - NHL
The Rangers finished 34-39, missing the playoffs in a season they entered expecting to contend. Their Pythagorean projection of approximately 39 wins means New York left five wins on the table, enough to have placed them firmly in a wild-card spot.
New York's Luck Index of -48 was driven by a ghastly shootout and overtime record that turned narrow deficits into definitive losses. Their 5-on-5 goal differential was broadly competitive. The margins just broke the wrong way, repeatedly, in the moments that mattered most.
---
The thread connecting all five teams is not bad defense or poor rosters, though some qualify on both counts. It is finishing variance, the gap between the chances these teams created or allowed and the results those chances produced. Close games went sideways. Conversion rates dipped below expectation. Save percentages wobbled. None of it was dramatic enough to notice on any single night. Across a full season, it added up to something that looks a lot like a curse.
