Great points by everyone.
But I would argue that Columbus was predicted to finish dead last in the standings by some "experts". Especially with their very difficult two month schedule playing against top teams, many, including myself predicted Torts to be fired by Christmas.
Both teams predicted to play poorly the whole season, instead they both rise to the challenge and won their leagues (Columbus potentially winning).
It really doesn't matter. There are no cinderellas, no real shockers, in the NHL. It's a closed 30 team league with extreme forced parity. How many teams are more than 3 games above .500 so far this year? 6 or 7?
The top team in the NHL could very easily win 10-1 one night and lose 10-1 the next regardless of opponent. It's the nature of the game and the system. The 8th ranked team usually has a pretty decent chance to knock off the 1st in each Conference in the playoffs too.. Nobody is a cakewalk.
In English football (and all football), teams regularly lose fewer than
5 games total the WHOLE SEASON. In 2005, Arsenal didn't lose a single game in their entire 38 game premier league season. Not a single game. None of this play mediocre and squeak into the playoffs and get hot stuff.
In addition, football is an open system: teams move up and down the pyramid every year and if you aren't good enough you are relegated out of your league. So looking big picture Leicester didn't just beat the 20 teams of the Premier League, they beat the 92 teams of the four top leagues, and extending it further, they came out the best of a whole country pyramid which includes over 7,000 teams that could potentially one day be Premier League champions.
They did all of that with a (relatively) low pay roll and having literally just been promoted two years before. The only thing that would come even close is, as others have mentioned, if the NHL one day decided to do promotion and relegation with the AHL, and an AHL club jumped into the NHL and the next year won the Stanley Cup.
This type of historical sporting occurrence is literally not possible in the NHL end of story.