My brother recommended that I read a few sports-related excerpts from the book "The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives" by Leonard Mlodinow. One of the four excerpts included the following paragraph, which I thought was interesting in how you could relate it to the Wings.

A few years after Tversky's paper appeared, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist E. M. Purcell decided to investigate the nature of streaks in the sport of baseball. As I mentioned in chapter 1, he found, in the words of his Harvard colleague Stephen Jay Gould, that except for Joe DiMaggio's fifty-six-game hitting streak, "nothing ever happened in baseball above and beyond the frequency predicted by coin-tossing models." Not even the twenty-one-game losing streak experienced at the start of the 1988 season by Major League Baseball's Baltimore Orioles. Bad players and teams have longer and more frequent streaks of failure than great players and great teams, and great players and great teams have longer and more frequent streaks of success than lesser players and lesser teams. But that is because their average failure or success rate is higher, and the higher the average rate, the longer and more frequent are the streaks that randomness will produce. To understand these events, you need only to understand the tossing of coins."

So maybe that helps to explain why the Wings are so successful? 18 straight playoff appearances = longer and more frequent streaks of success? I'm not a stats person by any stretch of the imagination, but I thought that was interesting.