(Hello, this is a feature that will run through the entire season and aims to recap the weekend’s events and boils those events down to one admittedly superficial fact or stupid opinion about each team. Feel free to complain about it.

Over the last five seasons, the team that has had the puck more than any other — 54.8 percent of the time, in fact — is the Los Angeles Kings. In fourth place — at 52.7 percent — is the Boston Bruins.

Neither made the playoffs this year.

One thing this certainly does not present is any sort of reason to think that possession stats are in any way not predictive, not worth tracking, etc. Yes, we acknowledge that results in the NHL predicated heavily upon luck (some 40 percent of point totals over the season come via things you can't control) but by my count that still leaves 60 percent of results which are based upon repeatable skills like possession.

Sam Ventura, who helped start War on Ice, actually had a great quote the other day about how important it is to rely on the underlying numbers whenever possible to judge teams: “Even if hockey is 90 percent random, smart teams would do whatever they can to gain an advantage in that remaining 10 percent.”

Indeed, the Kings were the best possession team in the league again this season, and Boston was 11th in this regard, but having missed the playoffs seems likely to cause a lot of introspection. One thing that would be devastating to either club's chances going forward is if they buy into the myth — as the Sharks did last year, to their great and prolonged misery — that something is fundamentally lacking in the way they approach the game.

For Los Angeles, this is obvious. They became the first team since the introduction of the asinine three-point game became available to simultaneously lead the league in possession and miss the playoffs. Already, rumors swirl about unrest in the room, and there's likely to be some roster attrition this summer simply because it's looking like the salary cap might go down if players don't use the escalator.

But the odds that a team can be this good and not make the playoffs for the second year in a row are more or less nil. The odds that a team can win just three out of its 18 games that go past regulation are also just about nil. This was a season of horribly unfortunate bounces counterbalancing the 12th best possession season since the 2005-06 lockout. Darryl Sutter is staying and that the players may not be too fond of his rhetoric is immaterial; as long as his systems keep producing possession outcomes like the Kings have seen the last several years — and there's no reason to believe it wouldn't unless there's some significant roster turnover for some stupid reason — then this is a team that can continue to have success for a long time.

Dean Lombardi should do all in his power to keep his roster as-is, with the exception of jettisoning, say, a Mike Richards contract if he can, because it really is one of the three or four best in the league. People want to chalk this up to age but the average Kings player (27 years, 63 days) is actually younger than the average Flames player (27 years, 133 days).

Which team is considered the young up-and-coming club in the league again?

People also want to blame the amount of tread that's worn off the tires in LA behind three straight trips to the Conference Final at least, and if you want to believe the wear and tear from playoff games three years ago is still plaguing them now, well then the good news is they're going to be resting from mid-April to mid-September. If anything, that might make them Cup favorites, right?

As for the Bruins, though, the “what to do?” answers are less clear.

Unlike the Kings, there would be not a single eyebrow raised if Peter Chiarelli, Claude Julien, or both were fired, or if there was a massive roster overhaul. The argument is that Chiarelli built a team for a style that doesn't work in the NHL any more, and Julien deploys the players he's given in a rather unsatisfactory way, and that a number of high-priced players underperformed. All of these are true to one extent or another.

The foibles of the Chiarelli/Julien era are obvious to those who've paid the slightest bit of attention. The former overvalued players who had no business getting long-term, big-money extensions. The latter then played those players in situations that they never should have seen. Thus, everyone is criticized for not performing.