Over the past week a lot of people have started to take notice of what the Columbus Blue Jackets are doing.

Specifically, they’re winning a lot. And they shouldn’t.

Greg covered it pretty well the other day: They’re a lot like the Calgary Flames, Colorado Avalanche, Minnesota Wild, Dallas Stars, Ottawa Senators, and every other over-performing team before them. They get outshot pretty consistently, and are driven by a huge shooting percentage and sky-high save percentage.

The latter might be more sustainable because, when healthy, Sergei Bobrovsky has often proven himself a competent goaltender. “When healthy” is a tough caveat there, because at any second his groin might rip in half with the force of a Saturn V rocket trying to slip the earth’s surly bonds. But so far so good for Bobrovsky, and even when Nick Foligno and Scott Hartnell stop shooting 20-plus percent, he might keep them in more games than they “should” be in.

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But they’re a poorly coached team that has a mountainous power play percentage and have been lucky as hell at 5-on-5, and we all know they’re going to collapse, if not in the regular season then in a first-round clubbing at the hands of an actual good team. It’s happened plenty of times before. It will continue happening.

And lately, the New York Rangers have started to land in this same kind of territory, which is kinda de rigueur for them as well. The defense isn’t good enough to keep shot volumes down, but Henrik Lundqvist is so outstanding it doesn’t matter (until about the second round). And that’s even with this improved — and impressive — offense they have going now. You can’t count on forwards to lug the puck out of your own zone forever, but for right now their expected-goals number is well above 50, so they should be safe for a while even as the defense collapses.

But there’s one team on a near-historic run of outperforming expected goals, which over the course of a season has long proven the best judge of future success. Pretty much all the analysis of “teams set to regress” has focused on the Blue Jackets and Rangers. Some have also pointed out Washington continues to be pretty damn lucky as a team, as has Arizona.

The team no one has talked about is Chicago, currently leading the West after many serious analysts thought they were due for a step back or two. And yet here they are, with 28 points banked by Thanksgiving despite the continual loss of supporting talent over the past few years. At some point, maybe everyone just believes that a unit of Toews, Kane, Panarin, Keith, Hjalmarsson, Seabrook, and Crawford is enough to will this team to dominance year in and year out for another half-decade.

But to give you an illustration of how incredibly lucky Chicago has been at 5-on-5 to this point in the season, here’s their expected versus actual performance versus the “lucky” Blue Jackets and the rest of the league. These stats are adjusted for score, venue, and zone:

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As you can see, they’re well above 50 percent in goals (58.9 percent, second in the league behind super-lucky-but-at-least-good-also Washington). But they’re somewhat below break-even in expected goals (47 percent, fifth-last in the NHL). So they’ve won all these games despite a dreadful penalty kill and so-so power play, which tells you that they’ve been even luckier at 5-on-5 than you might otherwise expect. In fact, in all situations their expected-goals doesn’t change much, but their actual goals share drops to about 52 percent.

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All of this tells you a story you should have been able to guess if you’ve watched Chicago the past few years: Their quality has slowly but surely declined as more and more high-level depth players were jettisoned to keep the elites together. Ever since that second round of sell-offs after the 2013 Cup win, Chicago has relied more and more on their top guys to get the job done, because Brandon Saad, Patrick Sharp, Andrew Shaw, Marcus Kruger , Johnny Oduya, Nick Leddy, and Michael Frolik among others have been forced to find work elsewhere.

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