It was a rough year for one of my favorite stats. Years ago, when Elliotte Friedman introduced his curse of November 1, I had the same reaction that most fans seemed to: It didn’t make sense. Over a decade ago, Friedman pointed out how rare it is for a team to be four points out of the playoffs at the start of November and end up making it, but the results felt wrong. After all, you can make up four points in two games – doing it in five months should be easy. And yet, Friedman found that the failure rate was close to 90%.
NHL weekend rankings: Playoff outsiders I still believe in, at least for now
