By Neil Kanterman, u/neek555 on Reddit
There’s a lot of talk of a President’s Trophy curse. The trophy is awarded to the team with the top record at the end of the regular season. Popular theories state that you don’t want to win the President’s Trophy because it is correlated with poor results in the NHL Playoffs and since the Stanley Cup is the primary goal of every team, such a “curse” is working against this.
While it may be attractive to try and make such connections and the human brain loves to try and recognize patterns and make future predictions. The problem is that this particular assumption does not pan out.
16 teams enter the Stanley Cup Playoffs each year. Assuming equal skill/schedule, that would put any random team’s probability of winning the cup at around 6%. Obviously perfect parity does not exist in the real world, and some teams are more likely to win the Stanley Cup than others, either through differences in team skill, or better schedules or matchups. Moneypuck just released their latest probabilities for each team to win the Stanley Cup (as of this being written) and the oddsmakers are giving Calgary the greatest chance to win the Stanley Cup at 14.3%, which is well over double the “random” team’s expectation of 6%.
The President’s Trophy has been awarded 35 times since it’s inception in 1986. Of those 35 teams, 8 have gone on to win the Stanley Cup, which represents 22.8% of the time, which is more than 50% greater than the chance of the most likely team to win the Stanley Cup this year, as per the oddsmakers. Any team entering the playoffs should be drooling at the prospects of joining a group of a select few teams with that high a track record of winning it all.
In the end it’s hard to win the Stanley Cup. You must win 16 more games against the very best teams after a grueling 82 game season. There is also the phenomenon of the “gamblers” or “Monte Carlos” fallacy which causes people to expect past results to affect future independent occurrences. But entering game one of the NHL playoffs is truly an independent event, and if a fan is expecting a successful regular season to all but guarantee a deep run and Stanley Cup appearance, much less winning it outright, they are more than likely to end up disappointed.
Any fan of a team should be thrilled with their team being awarded the President’s Trophy, as the teams that do, win the Stanley Cup at a rate significantly higher than one would otherwise be able to predict.