process vs. outcome
Thesis: hockey, relative to other American sports, has a much higher percentage of players/coaches/fans who intuitively understand and think in terms of expected value and, consequently, are somewhat less results-oriented than other sports' fans. Why?
Hockey is low-scoring. Even when you do everything right on a given sequence of action, you usually don't score. This inherently teaches players that all you can do is create good opportunities to score. Beyond that, the results are going to be quite random in any individual instance. There's a correlation, but you will only see it in aggregate.
Hockey is also high-variance. This is partially a different way of describing point #1 above, but also a separate point: good opportunities often don't result in goals, and totally mediocre opportunities often do. The NHL stats-geeks now measure High Danger Chances, and it strongly correlates with goals, but you can easily win a game where the other team has three times as many HDCs as you do. Happens all the time. "Puck Luck" is the official term for it.
Consequently, everyone in hockey talks about process, all the time. The name of the game is creating high danger chances and putting yourself in position to win. A 4-0 victory where you get outplayed is great for the 2 standings points you get, but a concern for every coach.1 And a 4-1 loss where you totally outplay the other team sucks, but is no cause for concern among the coaches or players.
Many coaches harp on this in public. Spencer Carbery, coach of the Washington Capitals, talks about all of this regularly in post-game interviews, in regard to the team and individual players. For the latter, the hockey term is rewarded. As in, "Player X has been working hard and doing all the little things and it was great to see him get rewarded tonight with a goal and an assist." This is also how many players talk in interviews.
I suspect--but have no actual idea--that soccer also has these qualities, given its low-scoring and high-variance similarities to hockey.
One Caps game I remember in particular featured them getting outshot something like 45-16 and out high-danger-chanced something like 14-2, and yet they won 4-0. It both feels great and terrible.↩