You can put in thousands of hours of practice, skating drills, puckhandling drills, shot accuracy drills, passing drills, weight training, cardio, yoga, plyometrics, what have you -- sometimes you just need the lucky bounce.
Nowhere was that more obvious than in Pittsburgh on Sunday when Pittsburgh Penguins forward Rickard Rakell opened the scoring against the Philadelphia Flyers. Right out of a faceoff in the Flyers zone, Rakell drifted in between the circles to get in prime shooting position. A perfect pass from defenseman Brian Dumoulin got right on Rakell's tape. Rakell unleashed a rocket, but missed the net high by about six feet. Didn't matter. As luck would have it, Rakell's shot smacked off of the glass, came down perfectly straight and banked into the net off the back of Flyers goalie Samuel Ersson. Ersson had moved back toward the inside of the net, trying to react properly to the odd play, but there was just no stopping this one. If Rakell has ever condsidered playing the lottery, tonight's the night.