Predicting The Stanley Cup Winner

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 favorite 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 favor 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.

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 favorites 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.”

What the stats say

The analytics disagree.

The Stars’ odds equate to roughly a 13.3% chance of winning the Cup. According to the hockey prediction site MoneyPuck’s data from 100,000 simulations, they’re sixth at 8.1%.

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%.

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.

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.

With no team with shorter odds than 6-1 and plenty of uncertainty on paths through the playoffs, 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.

So who wins the Cup?

The pundits seem to think 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.

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 3% in the Jets’ case, but a hot goalie can often make the difference.

(Canadian Press)