Stanley Cup Champions' Strength of Playoff Schedule (1968 to present)

[Doctor No]

Have thought about this a lot the past few days with a thread on the main boards going - asking how the Bruins' 2019 playoff run compared to other finalists. I wanted to answer how different Cup champions' schedules have measured up. Who had the toughest runs? Who had the easiest?

On my goaltender page, I calculate a Simple Rating System measure of each team's strength - this is their schedule-adjusted goal differential, including all regular season and playoff games for the year in question. More on that elsewhere in this forum, but a typical "top team" in the NHL is usually about +1.000 goals/game for the year, while a bottom-feeder is about -1.000 goals/game.

On my site, I calculate a goaltender's Strength of Schedule as the minutes-weighted average of his opponents, but let's do something simpler here. Each Stanley Cup champion plays four (or three) opponents in the playoffs - what if we give each opponent equal weight? Here's what we get.

Click to read more...

 

[Doctor No]

 

[Doctor No]

Open question - and I know how I want to solve this, but have to get to bed soon so won't be solving it tonight - so I wanted to mention it. Right now, teams 1979 and older don't get "credit" for either having a first-round bye, or for having only three rounds. For instance, 1976 Montreal's schedule of Chicago, the Islanders, and Philadelphia looks quite good, but they also only had to play three opponents (and not four). More on this later.

I also didn't account for better teams having home-ice advantage (which would make an average "great" team's schedule slightly weaker, since they'd play a greater proportion of their games at home).

 

[Doctor No]

Are there general patterns to note? These show each champion's schedule, newest (left) to oldest (right):

 

[Doctor No]

These are the 15 toughest Stanley Cup champion schedules, 1968 to present:

 

[Doctor No]

These are the 15 easiest Stanley Cup champion schedules, 1968 to present:

Standard caveat - "easiest" is a relative measure, and "easy" is not. No Stanley Cup champion has an "easy" schedule (although the 1981 Islanders faced a below-average opponent on average).

 

[Nino33]

Interesting; thanks for your efforts

 

[Hockey Outsider]

Interesting how the NY Islanders are at either end of the spectrum - two very easy paths, two very difficult ones, and none in the middle.

 

[canuckster19]

It would be interesting to see their finals opponent number as well to see if the “easier” path provides a winner or loser more often.

 

[Henkka]

These are the 15 easiest Stanley Cup champion schedules, 1968 to present:

View attachment 248985

Standard caveat - "easiest" is a relative measure, and "easy" is not. No Stanley Cup champion has an "easy" schedule (although the 1981 Islanders faced a below-average opponent on average).

Always fun to notice, what is common for Top3 modern winners (Anaheim 2007, Colorado 1996, Devils 1995)... All did beat great Detroit teams which results a high rank.

 

[The Panther]

(Just seeing this now...)

I appreciate the OP's efforts here, and I think we would mostly agree that, for example, the Isles in 1981 isn't one of the harder paths to the Cup when they beat three sub-.500 teams to reach the Finals, and the finalist was 9th overall Minnesota.

But, I have to question the system when I see things like 1970 Boston being one of the most difficult, and 1988 Edmonton being much less so. I'm not seeing it. Boston beat three teams for the Cup, only one a top club (Chicago, whom Boston tied for top-spot in the regular season). The other two are the 4th place Rangers and a recent expansion team, St.Louis, in the Finals. St.Louis, by the way, had a decent .566 season, but that's with 40 of their 76 matches against recent expansion teams.

Edmonton in 1988 beat just-under .500 Winnipeg in the first round, sure. (That's probably about the equivalent of Boston beating St.Louis for the Cup in 1970.) But in the next three rounds, they beat 1st overall Calgary (sweep), 5th overall Detroit (one loss), and 4th overall Boston (sweep). How is this easier than Boston 1970 by a large factor??

Probably most of the stats above make some logical sense, but this is just one that came to mind which seemed a bit off.

 

[Doctor No]

No, I agree 100% - in fact, see this post from above.

Open question - and I know how I want to solve this, but have to get to bed soon so won't be solving it tonight - so I wanted to mention it. Right now, teams 1979 and older don't get "credit" for either having a first-round bye, or for having only three rounds. For instance, 1976 Montreal's schedule of Chicago, the Islanders, and Philadelphia looks quite good, but they also only had to play three opponents (and not four). More on this later.

Although Edmonton played a pretty easy first-round opponent in a below-average Jets squad, they had a better chance to win that first round than Boston, who played...no one.

I know how to put this together - ascribe an a priori probability of losing each series, and then the overall schedule strength is the product of those values. It requires information that I have in my internal models (the variation of goals scored in each season for each team) but haven't had a chance to dust off...yet.

 

[Name Nameless]

What's with the parantheses?

 

[Doctor No]

It's a default Excel representation of negative numbers.

 

[c9777666]

I'm surprised the 1981 Islanders is deemed easier than '82- Minnesota was still better than most of their '82 playoff foes.

 

[The Panther]

I'm surprised the 1981 Islanders is deemed easier than '82- Minnesota was still better than most of their '82 playoff foes.

I dunno, let's check out the teams' records:

1981 opponents
.444 Toronto (sweep)
.463 Edmonton (six games)
.463 Rangers (sweep)
.544 Minnesota (five games)
.479 average

1982 opponents
.469 Pittsburgh (went to max. no. of games)
.575 Rangers (six games)
.513 Quebec (sweep)
.481 Vancouver (sweep)
.510 average

So, easier Finalist in '82, but overall maybe a bit stronger opponents to get there.