Let's talk about two teams that are having very, very different seasons.

Team A is one of the best possession teams in the league, just about on par with Dallas. It has two of the greatest players in the world over the last six or seven years, depth at every position, and was widely expected to be one of the league's top teams after a summer of significant roster improvement.

Team B is a terrible possession team, worse than Calgary and Edmonton. It has very few even good players, no real depth to speak of, and simply never has much reason for optimism.

And yet, on Christmas day, Team A is second-last in the entire NHL. Meanwhile, Team B is a point out of a playoff spot and has at least two games in hand on the two teams directly in front of it.

So what matters more, results or process? Would you rather be the should-be-great team that's spinning its tires and getting nothing to go its way, or the should-be-awful team that keeps getting wins to go their way?

Obviously you should have figured out by now that Team A is the Anaheim Ducks, and B is the Arizona Coyotes.

And given what we know about the underlying numbers for these teams, we can probably also safely guess what their percentages look like. The Ducks have the second-lowest PDO (via the worst shooting percentage and seventh-worst save percentage) in the league. The Coyotes' is seventh-highest (highest shooting percentage, fifth-worst save percentage). And that gives you an idea about just how much luck has conspired against the Ducks this season.

Since 2007-08, the lowest 5-on-5 shooting percentage ever recorded in a full season was that of Arizona last year, at 5.7 percent. The Ducks' current number is just 5 percent (down from 8.3 percent a year ago) while the Coyotes' are shooting 9.7 percent this season. No matter how skeptical you may be of the ways in which teams have influence over the percentages they carry from one year to the next, we can all agree that there's no way the Coyotes made themselves nearly twice as talented when it comes to putting the puck in the net, nor that the Ducks made themselves about 40 percent worse.

There's no doubt that Anaheim shed some goalscoring talent, with the loss of Matt Beleskey being the real headliner there. But Beleskey moving on to Boston and Kyle Palmieri to New Jersey shouldn't crater a team's shooting percentage. And yet, these are the year-over-year, on-ice, score-adjusted shooting percentages for the Ducks' eight most-used returning forwards.

The identities of these guys on an individual basis don't matter much because you can see the overall trend, but I will say that the purple line — the only one that has moved up — is Rickard Rakell, whose on-ice shooting percentage is up 0.2 percentage points.

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There is, however, one player for whom these struggles are perhaps most significant, and whose performances have usually led people to begrudgingly acknowledge that the Anaheim Ducks' often-lofty shooting percentages were talent-driven rather than the product of luck. And that guy's year has been positively rotten.

Ryan Getzlaf, in 29 games this year, has zero goals at 5-on-5, and just one overall. That was scored into an empty net. The idea that Getzlaf would go 29 games with no goals, in what you'd consider the two game states that happen most often for his team, is appalling. But if you look at his personal shooting percentage on an historical basis, you can see that this isn't unprecedented.

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