Does winning the National Hockey League’s trophy for regular season success doom a team to futility in the playoffs? Let’s dig into the data to see what it tells us about the President’s Trophy Curse.
Wait, what about a curse?
The best team in the National Hockey League’s regular season is awarded a trophy, which is a good thing, but is actually a bad thing because any team that wins said trophy is destined for failure in the most important part of the NHL season: the playoffs. Makes sense? Then feel free to move right along to the next section. For everyone else, let’s rewind and pepper in some more details. Since the 1979-80 season, the NHL playoffs have pitted the league’s top sixteen teams against each other in a four-round gauntlet to determine which squad claims the storied Stanley Cup as champion. Playoff seeding is largely determined by regular season records with the best-performing teams earning the theoretical advantage of playing the weakest playoff qualifiers (check out NHL.com for a full explanation of playoff seeding). The team that accumulates the best regular season record has also claimed the President’s Trophy since its introduction in the 1985-86 season. For the last nine consecutive seasons the President’s Trophy winner has failed to also lift the Stanley Cup, fueling the belief among some fans and sportswriters that earning the top seed is a “curse” dooming a team to come up short in the postseason. Every time the frontrunner bows out early in the playoffs familiar articles reappear, but is the curse reality or recency bias? Significant or statistical noise? Prophecy or product of small sample size? Let’s take a look at the data and try to answer those questions.
So is the curse real?
Before we dive into the data I want to caution against drawing strong conclusions from it. Since the President’s Trophy has only been awarded 37 times, the dataset we’ll be analyzing is small and prone to significant fluctuations, especially when partitioned. For example, President’s Trophy winners won only one of the last ten championships for a win rate of 10%. Across all seasons in which the President’s Trophy was awarded, the top seed won the Stanley Cup 22% of the time. The gap between 10% and 22% might look large, but it would take only one more dual winner for the last decade of President’s Trophy winners to be very close to the overall win rate. It’s important to keep that swing in mind as we start to slice up the data; as a dataset gets smaller, differences can appear larger. With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s dig into the stats.
This first chart shows wins by regular season ranking for all 37 seasons in which both the President’s Trophy and the Stanley Cup were awarded. The President’s Trophy winner, and top-ranked team, won the cup most frequently, eight times or 22% of all eligible championships. Interestingly teams ranked fourth overall had the second-most wins, six or 17%. The data clearly shows the teams that won President’s Trophies won more Cups than any other playoff seed, so we can all stop worrying about the curse right? Maybe not: a lot of curse talk has centered on the recent run of futility by the top-ranked teams. Let’s see if the data shows any changes in win rates over time.
The line graph above shows changes in win rate over time by mapping a running average of Cup wins per season by President’s Trophy winners. In plain English, every data point represents a season and the percentage of championships won by the top-ranked team up to and including that season. When the line goes up teams increased the average number of championships won per season by winning more frequently; a downward trend means the opposite. If you’re still confused, hopefully reviewing some sample calculations will help. In the first charted season, 1985-86, the President’s Trophy winner did not win the Stanley Cup: the running average of Cup wins per season for 1985-86 is 0, because the one team in the calculation did not win the championship. By the conclusion of the 1988-89 season, the running average of Stanley Cup wins per season is up to .5 since two out of the four teams in the calculation won (2 / 4 = .5). The earliest seasons have some wild fluctuations because when there are only a small number of total seasons, a single win greatly alters the average Cups won. By around the 1992-93 season, the volatility starts to smooth out and we can see an upward trend that peaks with the 2001-02 season. What follows is a consistent downward trend in Stanley Cup win percentage by President’s Trophy winners, making the 2001-02 season a clear inflection point. The two opposite trends tell us that top seeds won the Stanley Cup more frequently before the 2001-02 season and have won less often since then.
Let’s take a look at two final bar charts, which split the first chart in this blog post along the inflection point: the 2001-02 season. The chart on the left shows Stanley Cup wins by team regular season rank between the 1985-86 and 2001-02 seasons and the one on the right shows the same metric for every season after 2001-02. We already know the President’s Trophy winners fared better in the pre-inflection era, but look at how dominant they were compared to their peers! Top seeds won 35% of those championships, far outpacing the second-winningest seeds, tied at 12%. Now compare that superiority to the performance of President’s Trophy winners since the 2001-02 season: not only is the massive Cup lead gone, but top seeds are only the third-winningest rank in the post-inflection era. Fourth-ranked teams in particular have done well for themselves in recent seasons, winning 26% of Cups to first-ranked teams’ 11% win rate. One last observation: even though the President’s Trophy winners won a smaller share of championships after 2001-02, top teams as a group were equally successful before and after the inflection point. A top-four regular season team won 59% of Cups awarded between the 1985-86 and 2001-02 seasons and 58% of championships since 2001-02. Even with the recent run of futility by President’s Trophy winners, top seeds remain as collectively dominant as ever.
So let’s finally answer the question: is the President’s Trophy curse real? I’m not superstitious enough to call it a curse, but there’s no denying that having the best record in the NHL has not led to the kind of playoff success in recent years that front-runners have enjoyed in the past. Does this mean teams with Stanley Cup aspirations should be trying to avoid winning the President’s Trophy? Absolutely not. The top 25% of playoff qualifiers have consistently won close to 60% of Stanley Cups over the last 37 seasons. Teams should not fear finishing first based on a small sample of failure, especially when the top four seeds have had such sustained success.
Maybe the real curse is the data
If you’re interested in examining President’s Trophy and Stanley Cup data yourself, you can find visualizations in this Tableau workbook and data sets in this GitHub repository. I keep warning against drawing strong conclusions throughout this post due to the small sample sizes, but that isn’t the only issue with the dataset. The NHL expanded significantly throughout the time range of the data, growing from 21 teams in the 1985-86 season to the current 32 squads. While the number of playoff entrants has remained the same since before the introduction of the President’s Trophy, the regular season point system and playoff format both evolved. Perhaps the most impactful change, the 2005 introduction of a hard salary cap prevented the league’s wealthiest clubs from grossly outspending their competitors. All of the aforementioned alterations to the league’s structure make decades-long comparisons difficult, because the competitive landscape differed significantly at the extremes of those ranges. Shrinking the time range of a data set limits the variation in rules and conditions, but exacerbates the problems associated with tiny data sets: cursed if you do, cursed if you don’t. Further complicating matters, teams played some recent seasons under anomalous conditions: labor disputes shortened regular seasons in 1994-95 and 2012-13 and the COVID-19 pandemic forced another protracted season and 24-team extended playoff in 2019-20. This combination of limited observations, league expansion, evolution of rules, and outlier seasons should temper confidence in interpreting any perceived pattern as a long-term trend.