In the opening game of the second-round series between the Chicago Blackhawks and the Minnesota Wild last May, the teams were tied 3-3 through almost two periods at the United Center.

With less than a minute left in the frame, Chicago’s Teuvo Teravainen corralled a puck that was bouncing along the boards in the Minnesota zone. He turned and flipped it toward the net. It tumbled through the air. There was a typical amount of fencing in front of Devan Dubnyk’s crease, so the Wild goalie didn’t see the puck until just before it passed over his shoulder.

That goal, the product of much good fortune and a smattering of skill, won the game for the Blackhawks, who would sweep the Wild — two of the four wins came in one-goal games — on the way to winning the Stanley Cup. It also was totally unremarkable, in that it was a perfect Playoff Goal, the kind that seem to be a result of a series of slow-motion car wrecks as much as they seem to be a perfectly executed play.

This is the thing about playoff hockey: as much thought goes into the coaching and the analysis and the predictions, so much of it comes down to luck.

This isn’t a particularly bold conclusion, as anyone who has had their heart broken watching the games knows, but as it happens some smart people have gone and done the math.

Anette (Peko) Hosoi is a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She led a research team that studied the components of luck and skill in various competitions. The research was carried out as an analysis of the daily fantasy sports industry, where the skill-versus-luck question has serious real-life consequences. (Several U.S. states are reconsidering the legality of daily fantasy, and the industry’s chief defence is that their games are primarily skill-based. The research, incidentally, agrees.)

But the MIT team also found out something that should salve the wounds of anyone whose NHL predictions this spring turn out to be way off: hockey is the luckiest of any of the major sports.

“If you are thinking about skill versus luck, nothing is all skill or all luck,” says Hosoi in an interview from Boston.

But, if you place each sport along that spectrum, hockey is the furthest toward the luck side, toward coin flipping.

This is, to be clear, not to say that hockey is not a skill sport.

“We are looking at the design of the game to determine if more skilled players win more often,” Hosoi says.

In hockey, the researchers found, it’s pretty random. “The things that push you to the luck end of the spectrum is if you only play a few games, or if you only have a few scoring opportunities per game,” Hosoi says.

Again, this backs up what we know about hockey just from watching it.

A tightly contested game can turn on one weird bounce or one shot that finds its way through a tangle of legs and skates. Actual scoring chances can often be in the single digits per team. Compare that with basketball, where each team can take 70-plus shots in a game, and almost all of them have a decent chance of scoring. Over all those events, the statistical noise — the flukes — are washed out.

“If somebody makes a lucky shot in basketball, it doesn’t change the season,” Hosoi says. “Where, if someone has a lucky shot in hockey, it can have a big effect.”

The research looked at five years’ worth of games and determined whether skill was consistent over the course of a season. If skill was intrinsic, then good teams should remain good and bad teams should remain bad within a season. (Trades, coaching changes and the like can also alter a team dramatically within a season, but those that have a meaningful effect are relatively rare.)

“But if it’s a game of chance, everyone is going to regress to the mean,” Hosoi says.

Which is what happens in the NHL more than other team sports, the data shows. Everything collapses toward the middle.

On the luck-versus-skill spectrum, the researchers found, the order of the major team sports goes like this: hockey, football, baseball, basketball. So, in the order of fewest scoring chances to most, more or less.

And if hockey is heavily influenced by randomness over the course of a regular season, would that be exacerbated in a short playoff series?

“That’s absolutely true, from a mathematical perspective,” Hosoi says.

Four wins in seven games ramps up the luck factor even more. Which helps explain why only two of the past 10 winners of the Presidents’ Trophy managed to follow that up with a Stanley Cup victory.

“But having said that,” she says, “that curve is also pretty steep initially. Four out of seven is much better than three out of five.”

The hockey playoffs may be a mad series of flukes and happenstance today, but at least they stopped deciding them with a best-of-five series, then.

Console yourself with that, the next time your team hits the post twice, and then loses.

Email: sstinson@postmedia.com

Twitter: @scott_stinson