‘Just Get In’. ‘Anything can happen’.
It’s an archaic strategy. And we still hear and see it emanating from NHL front offices every year. If we just get in, we could be this year’s 2023 Florida Panthers. Or this year’s 2021 Montreal Canadiens. Or this year’s 2003 Anaheim Ducks. The underdog. The Cinderella team. Just get in and, if we play to our potential, anything can happen.
Yet Cinderella stories almost universally do not have happy endings in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The 2012 Los Angeles Kings are the only 8th seed to ever bring home the cup. So why do we still hear and see this mantra in the NHL?
Let’s dive into some probabilities, starting with a single game. There are a variety of different public models out there that look at the likelihood of either team winning a single contest. Generally, with two relatively evenly matched teams, the favorite might have a 50-60% chance of winning the game. That’s not far off coin flip odds. It lends credence to the idea that any team can beat any other team on any given night. It’s certainly not terrible if you’re an underdog.
When we extend the sample size to a 7 game series, the odds get slightly longer but they’re still in the realm of possibility. If we look at last year’s Florida Panthers, my model gave them about a 30% shot to knock off the Bruins in the first round. Now consider that a goalie might get hot (or a powerplay, or a penalty kill, or…) and it’s not hard to see how an underdog might expect to pull off an upset in a single playoff round.
Where the ‘just get in’ strategy really runs into trouble, though, is when we consider that you have to win 4 series to win the Stanley Cup. 16 wins. Usually about 25 games in total. I use a minimum sample size of 200 5v5 minutes per season in my player projection models. The intent is to gather a large enough sample size to avoid hot/cold streaks tricking the models. For most players, that 200 5v5 minutes takes about 20 games to accumulate. Do we see the problem yet?
Even if a team goes on a heater at just the right time, it’s likely to fade back to a more long term sustainable level before they lift Lord Stanley’s mug. And that brings their odds of a series win back to improbable territory. It might be the biggest reason we see so many Cinderella team runs fall short, like the 2023 Panthers and 2021 Canadiens.
The bottom line is the ‘just get in’ strategy is more of a hope and a prayer than a real strategy. If often leads to a team getting stuck in perpetual mediocrity as they make individual transactions with the goal of winning the Stanley Cup, but without the roadmap of how they are going to do that. We need a more sophisticated vision to increase the odds of winning the Stanley Cup. We’ll look at perhaps the most prevalent teambuilding strategy in the NHL next.
