(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.)

People don't like to hear it or think about it very much, but such a huge portion of what happens in the NHL over the course of a season is driven by luck, and luck alone, that it boggles the mind.

When it comes to setting where each team finishes in the standings, luck — or rather, things that cannot be quantified or depended upon or predicted accurately — makes up 38 percent of results. Nearly two-fifths.

If a defenseman's stick breaks on a point shot attempt and a 2-on-0 goes the other way and scores, that's luck. Luck that the stick broke, luck that the puck went to an opponent, luck that no one could get back to defend, luck that the puck went in. If the same play happens and the 2-on-0 results in a pass that gets flubbed, or a shot that somehow misses the net, or gets saved, or hits the post, that's also luck,. Depending on which side you're on, either one is good or bad. It all boils down to probabilities. An x percent chance a stick breaks, a y percent chance a shot goes off as planned, etc. This kind of thing happens literally millions of times over the course of a season, league-wide.

Luck, viewed thusly, can manifest itself in a lot of ways. Over the course of a season, a goalie might have a much higher or lower save percentage than their career average. A single player, entire line, or even a whole team can shoot well above or below what is considered a reasonable save percentage for an entire year, or just part of one. There's not really much explaining it when it happens. Guys can get “hot” or “cold” for any reason, or no reason at all. Injuries pile up. And this contributes, a lot, to wins and losses.

Hockey is a low-event sport, in terms of what we can measure and track. There just aren't many goals scored per game, or even a particularly huge amount of shots recorded in any given 60 minutes of hockey. We think 30 is a lot, for instance, but that's only because we've come to know that 30 is a lot. If a few tweaks were made to the rules, the ice dimensions, roster sizes, etc. 100 years ago, maybe 30 would be a small number, and 40 more in line with the league average at this point. But these numbers are in and of themselves not necessarily conducive to really being able to level the playing field to where it “should be” according to analytics, even over an 82-game schedule.

And that's why when teams rise through the standings, analytics sometimes say that the methods they use to do so are “unrepeatable.” Whether it's because they have a sky-high PDO but bad possession numbers, or because they win a lot of shootouts, or because they have a good record in one-goal games, we are given reason to doubt that a team is as good as the won-lost record says.

But one team in particular seems to buck this trend. On Friday night, the Ducks beat the Blues 4-3 in Anaheim, giving them yet another one-goal win. That bumped their record in one-goal games to 19-0-6 on the year; 25 one-goal games, and only six points missing from a possible 50. That is an insane number. Absolutely bonkers. Even the most stats-averse observer has to say that no team is that good at playing in tight games. They should have lost one by that point. (Update: The Ducks are now 20-0-6 in one-goal games after beating Nashille 4-3 in a shootout on Sunday.)

And so it's not really a surprise that they should be the best team in the league through Saturday's games. When you've taken 44 of your points in one-goal games — a number which doesn't count four times they've scored into an empty net, or the three times the other team has, bringing them to a total of 32 of their 40 games effectively being decided by a single goal — you tend to rocket up the table, and you seem to be doing so in an unsustainable way.

But where the Anaheim Ducks are concerned, this is actually not the case.

Somehow, since 2009-10, the Ducks have gone 73-30 in one-goal games that were decided in regulation. That winning percentage (.708) dwarfs the next-closest team's .580. And so at some point, you perhaps have to say that this is something of a repeatable skill the Ducks have for themselves. An odds-defying, almost inexplicable skill, but a skill nonetheless.