Everybody’s got a hunch this time of year, a thought about the so-called Presidents’ Trophy “curse” or maybe a dark horse Stanley Cup pick.
Only one team of the 16 in the NHL playoffs gets to be champion, and even before the first round begins Saturday, there is rampant disagreement on who the favourite actually is.
Winnipeg and Washington were the top teams in the league all season, finishing atop the West and East, respectively, to earn home-ice advantage. Florida is the defending champion looking for a third consecutive trip to the final. Dallas is the oddsmakers’ top selection, while some metrics favour Carolina.
What played out on the ice has collided with math, odds and probability in the debate over who will hoist the trophy in June.
“As great as the season has been for Winnipeg and Washington, I think most people would agree that there’s not one team out there that really kind of screams, ‘Oh, this is the team that should win the Stanley Cup this year,’” said Andy MacNeil, a hockey handicapper and host of The Puck Portfolio on Daily Faceoff.
“It’s just one of those years where even the Toronto Maple Leafs could finally go all the way and get to a Stanley Cup Final because the Eastern Conference, just like the Western Conference, I think is wide open right now.”
The sports books
BetMGM Sportsbook, which provides odds for The Associated Press, gives the Stars the edge at 13-2 early this week despite six straight losses down the stretch, blowing a chance to catch the Jets for first in the Central Division much less the West or Presidents’ Trophy. The Panthers are next at 7-1, Colorado at 8-1, Edmonton 17-2, the Hurricanes 9-1, Washington 19-2, Vegas 10-1 and Tampa Bay and Winnipeg each 11-1.
Dallas and Florida have been betting favourites since making big moves at the trade deadline. Matthew Rasp, BetMGM’s senior sports trader setting the opening odds for hockey, thinks the Stars adding Mikko Rantanen to an already stacked roster makes them the most formidable contender.
“The goaltending is strong for Dallas there (and) they’ve got the veterans there,” Rasp said. “Even though they’ve kind of floundered here a bit of late — they’ve had some bad losses that have gotten a lot of publicity — we still feel good about their goal differential and their team construct from top to bottom here.”
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What the stats say
The analytics disagree.
The Stars’ odds equate to roughly a 13.3 per cent chance of winning the Cup. According to the hockey prediction site MoneyPuck’s data from 100,000 simulations, they’re sixth at 8.1 per cent.
As of last week, MoneyPuck had the Hurricanes with the highest odds. As of Monday, it was the Jets. On Tuesday, the Panthers held the top spot at 11.2 per cent.
“It does look at recent play, but it does fluctuate some,” said Peter Tanner, the data scientist who has run the site for nearly a decade.
MoneyPuck’s formula involves a combination of scoring chances, expected goals, goaltending and some other factors that look at recent success and even how some players and teams come up bigger in clutch moments. That’s one way of trying to quantify a sport filled with inherent randomness.
“When I was a kid, I always thought the team that won the Cup was like the best team,” Tanner said. “Now I think they’re probably a pretty good team that got lucky.”
The intangibles
The NHL and Major League Baseball are the least likely major sports leagues to see the best regular-season team win a championship, followed by the NFL and the NBA, which is the most likely.
There are so many intangibles in play in hockey – player injuries, matchups across four forward lines, a goaltender on a dark horse team who gets rolling and shuts down more talented opponents.
“I also think there’s just so much more parity now than, say, 20 years ago, so that kind of factors in,” Tanner said, adding MoneyPuck’s highest-odds team has won the Cup just once since he started running the site.
With no team with shorter odds than 6-1 and plenty of uncertainty on paths through the playoffs, Rasp said most of the money is coming in on longshots, like St. Louis at 45-1, and Montreal at 80-1, even though neither team had clinched a spot going into games Tuesday.
“We’ve seen it before in the past that these teams that have been playing meaningful hockey for the last month, they can catch fire,” Rasp said. “We’ve seen 8 seeds take out 1 seeds, and the teams that have taken the foot off the gas a little bit here, they can get caught in the first round playing against a team that’s been playing playoff hockey for the last month or two.”
So who wins the Cup?
Rasp thinks the Cup champion will come out of the West this year, given the high-profile talent on that side of the bracket. Dallas and Colorado — two of the top three favorites according to BetMGM — play each other in first round, meaning one of the Central powerhouses will be out by round two — along with anyone who bet on the series loser.
“I would say that a lot of operators are probably happy to see one of those two teams get knocked out in the early rounds,” said MacNeil, who likes Los Angeles to knock off the Oilers and potentially make a run. There’s value in the Kings at 20-1 or even the Maple Leafs at 12-1 under 2019 Cup-winning coach Craig Berube, trying to end the franchise’s and Canada’s lengthy drought.
Winnipeg has the NHL’s top goaltender this season in Connor Hellebuyck, and the Lightning won back to back in 2020 and ’21 with Andrei Vasilevskiy in net. Tanner said having an elite goalie in his simulation only increases the odds of winning by up to three per cent in the Jets’ case, but a hot goalie can often make the difference.
“Sometimes I think about it like the goalie is just getting lucky, but some call that ‘hot,’ as well,” Tanner said. “It’s tricky. The hardest thing to predict in hockey is goalies.”
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