The NHL regular season can be an exhausting grind full of wild swings in emotion and opinions based on the most recent results of a particular team.Any team.In a league where , and pretty much every game is decided by a 3-2 or 2-1 margin, there is almost no room for error on a given night. A lot of games come down to a single shot, call or bounce, any of which can be the difference between feeling great about your team or feeling terrible about it no matter how it actually played on the ice.This can be especially maddening in a sport where you can dominate a game for 60 minutes and not get the desired result -- a win -- because the other team's goalie was great. Or because of any other fluke play that can happen when a bunch of guys are chasing a round disk around a frozen surface. And then that same team comes back the next night, plays like garbage, and somehow steals two points because the other team' Ryan Fitzpatrick T Shirts s goalie couldn't stop the four or five chances he had to face while your goalie stole the show. Gue s which game you're going to feel better about?Too often when these things happen we have a tendency to become prisoners of the moment where we a sume what we saw most recently from a team is what we are going to see from them next. Both good and bad. Bad teams will string together wins and make people believe in them again (remember when Buffalo had a 13-game stretch where it won 10 games back in late November and early December? Pretty hilarious Jonathan Allen Jersey ). Good teams will lose, supposedly exposing their flaws and in the proce s writing a book for the rest of the league on how to beat them that every other team can copy.No matter what team you cheer for or watch, you've probably heard or experienced some variation of these two things at some point this season. Maybe more than once.With that in mind, I wanted to focus on the good teams that hit a slump, what leads to them, and what they can tell us about what might happen next for a team. I wanted to focus on them because those are the teams that usually hit the panic button when they lose a few games, especially late in the season. A lot of times it isn't really warranted. No team is immune to losing a lot of games in a short period of time.Every team that is currently in a playoff spot (or in serious contention for a playoff spot, like Los Angeles or Ottawa) has had at least one three-game losing streak this season. Most of them have had more than one. The only teams that haven't lost than three games in a row at any point this season are Anaheim, Chicago, Montreal and Tampa Bay. And even they have had their i sues for extended periods of time. The Ducks had a stretch where they lost six out of seven and then later lost four out of five. The had a nine-game stretch back in November where they won only two games. The Canadiens have lost three in a row and had one stretch where they lost six out of seven.In short: It happens to everybody, no matter how good or bad your team is.But what goes into these type of stretches? do they happen?It's not always because a team isn't "competing" enough or doesn't have enough "jam."(Though, sometimes that be the case. Sometimes teams do get sloppy, lazy, disinterested, play poorly ... hey, it's a long season). But a lot of times it can simply come down to a couple of injuries to key players at the same time. Sometimes, as we saw with the earlier this season , it can come down to goaltending completely abandoning a team.And sometimes the opposite happens.Take Detroit for example. The Red Wings had a six-game losing streak back in December (one of the longest this season by a team in playoff contention -- only Calgary, which had an eight-game losing streak, lost Chris Cooley Jersey more in a row) where they controlled 57 percent of the shot attempts during 5-on-5 play (a championship level of puck po se sion) and had its goaltenders stop more than 94 percent of the shots they faced, a ridiculously high number.And they did not win a single game during that stretch, which seems almost impo sible. Why? Because they only scored five goals on 1.5 percent of their shots on goal. Was it because they were getting outworked? Hard to argue when they were dicating the pace of the game every night, and they certainly weren't giving up goals or quality chances. The puck just wasn't going in the net for them.And then they started scoring on more than seven percent of the shots (while maintaining the same po se sion numbers and still getting great goaltending) and won 14 out of their next 18.That's the thing about losing streaks. They don't always happen because a team is playing poorly, and they are not always as bad as they appear during that streak. This is kind of what is happening to Pittsburgh and the right now, two teams that seem to be on a collision course for a first-round playoff meeting in the Metropolitan Division, and both are riding four-game losing streaks (as part of larger slumps) that are driving their fans to the brink of madne s. Neither team can score right now (six goals between Curtis Samuel Jersey them in their past four games) even though they're controlling the puck (both teams are attempting more than 53 percent of the shots during their losing streaks) and creating chances. Making things even more frustrating is that they are, for the most part, preventing goals. They just can't score because they're both converting on le s than three percent of their shots, and it's crushing them.There were eight other playoff teams that experienced similar slumps this season where they dictated the pace of the play, and were either done in by poor shooting performances (scored on le s than 6 percent of their shots) or poor goaltending (below .900 save percentage). Or both.Here is each streak, their shooting and save percentages during said streak, and team team's points percentage in the 10 games that followed. What You Saw Last Is Not What You Will See NextTeamStreakShot Attempt %Shooting %Team Save %Next 10 GamesMinnesota WildLost 458.51.1.870.750Lost 657.31.5.944.700Winnipeg JetsLost 657.06.8.898.700Lost 6 of 756.46.9.899.800Los Angeles KingsLost 12 of 1556.36.6.888.800Lost 6 of 753.76.0.915.900Washington CapitalsLost 552.97.4.855.650Minnesota WildLost 651.46.9.840.850Those teams rebounded from those streaks to play, on average, at what would be a 125-point pace over the next 10 games, and continued on their winning ways.This is the nature of the beast that is the modern .The salary cap has helped distribute talent more evently acro s the league, there isn't as big of a gap between the good teams and the bad teams, and the game has been reduced to low-scoring goaltending duels that can often Washington Commanders Jackets times go either way. Put it all together and you have a league where there is no clear-cut dominant dynasty that you can point to every year and say "the Cup is theirs." Nobody dominates from wire to wire and everybody is going to be streaky.As much as people hate hearing this, sometimes you have to trust in the