Piggy-backing on this related thread from yesterday about the interesting randomness and luck (or lack thereof) involved in hockey, there are some good stats out there that new hockey/UHC fans should familiarize yourself with.

Deserve To Win O'Meter

Money Puck has a great analytics model called the "Deserve To Win O'Meter", to estimate how well a team deserves to win based on simulating the expected goals generated (and assuming average goalie play from both teams). Here is the game page from yesterday's Blackhawks vs. UHC game: https://moneypuck.com/g.htm?id=2024020005. It estimates UHC with a 54.5% chance of winning that game. That seems about right considering the Blackhawks' late surge to come back in the game but Ingram playing well, and with UHC seeming to dominate earlier in the game.

It's basically just a way to measure what your eyeballs might be telling you about how well the team seems to be doing, but obviously, the more "deserving" team per the Deserve To Win O'Meter doesn't always win.

In fact, at the Seattle game yesterday (which I attended in person), the Kraken had a 68.1% predicted chance of winning that game, but lost 3-2. See here: https://moneypuck.com/g.htm?id=2024020003. That tracks with what my live perspective of the game felt like. Kraken should have won that game based on how they generated scoring chance and played better overall. They just had a defensive lapse on a PP and another turnover resulting in a breakaway, that gave up their lead and had them chasing the game late. Even the Kraken players after the game commented that they liked overall how they played even if disappointed in the result.

PDO

Another great stat that measures puck luck is called "PDO" (which has a funny and organic origin story for its name you can read here: https://thesportsdaily.com/news/stat-week-whats-pdo-qa-brian-king-father-pdo/). PDO is simply just the teams' shooting percentage plus their save percentage in 5v5 situations. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good, and teams sometimes go on PDO benders where everything just seems to go their way.

PDO does not account for everything, but it does a surprisingly good job of charting lucky streaks teams can go on, where they might be shooting at a ridiculously high percentage, or stopping every shot imaginable.

Here's a deeper explanation of how it works, here: https://www.yardbarker.com/nhl/articles/explaining_pdo_and_why_it_matters_in_hockey/s1_15359_39212177.

Here's also an interesting blog post from a few years ago doing an analysis of PDO: https://patrickmilano.com/2019/07/19/puck-luck-understanding-pdo/.