How Often Does the Best Player in the Stanley Cup Finals Win It?
The Panthers have the best team, but the Oilers have Connor McDavid.
This year’s Stanley Cup Finals between the Florida Panthers and Edmonton Oilers is a study in contrasts. The former team’s recent success is emblematic of the NHL’s push to create winners in warm-weather locales; the latter carries the hopes of ending Canada’s 30+ year championship drought in its national sport. The 2,541 miles that separates their two home cities is the longest distance between competitors in Finals history.1
Most pertinently, the Panthers are probably the best team in the league, while the Oilers are led by the league’s best player, Connor McDavid. And that got me thinking: What’s better for winning the Cup — having the better star player, or the better overall team?
We can look at this by tracking how often each type of team won the Cup throughout history. (I’ll be going back to the 1980 playoffs, the first postseason that came after the WHA-NHL “merger”.)2 For our purposes, we can consider the “better team” in the Finals to be the one who had the higher regular-season Simple Rating System (SRS) score, and the team with the overall “better top player” to be the one whose leader had more Goals Above Replacement (GAR) during the regular season.
We can also further break that down into looking at teams that had the better top skater and the better top goalie. Here’s how often each of those team types ended up winning the Cup within our sample:
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the better team in the Finals (according to SRS) won the Cup 72 percent of the time, the best winning percentage of any category. Interestingly, the team whose star was better by GAR (across all positions) won just 61 percent of the time — though if we filter out goalies, the team with the superior top skater won 65 percent of its Finals. Meanwhile, the team with the better goalie won just 49 percent of the time, which would appear to validate previous research that showed just how unpredictable goaltending could be in the playoffs.
But we need to dig a little deeper to find situations specifically like Florida versus Edmonton. Within our sample, 30 of the 43 teams who had the superior SRS also had the better top player — rendering those examples less than fully relevant for the present purpose of our query.
What we really want are situations where the better SRS team — like Florida, whose +0.81 SRS led the league (Edmonton was fifth, at +0.65) was on the opposite side of the matchup from the best player in the Finals (McDavid had 27.4 GAR to Panthers leader Sam Reinhart’s 25.1). In cases like these, the team with the superior SRS but the lower-ranked top skater won 67 percent of the time in the Finals:
Conversely, the team with the better top skater and the worse overall SRS won only 33 percent of the time. From this chart, it seems clear that overall team quality is more conducive to winning than having more star power but a lower-rated team from top to bottom.
And finally, having the superior overall team and the superior regular-season goalie was the best combo of all, at 77 percent, despite our previous chart showing the seeming unimportance of having the better goalie when it came to winning the Cup. This could be attributable to the fact that the majority of teams with a lower SRS (60 percent) had the higher-rated goalie in the Finals. (Think of classic cases where a hot goalie drags a less-talented squad to the cusp of a championship — teams that probably didn’t have much business playing for the Cup otherwise.)
Technically, the Panthers also fit the better-team/better-goalie category: the ever-enigmatic Sergei Bobrovsky outplayed Oilers starter Stuart Skinner throughout the regular season, and a strong Eastern Conference finals showing has given him the superior postseason stats as well. But even if we discount the goalie battle, Florida’s combo of better-team/worse-star isn’t the worst place to be.
It’s important to note that these historical trends probably overstate the Panthers’ title chances; my meta-forecast model sets the series probabilities at 55-45 in favor of Florida. With margins running that thin, Edmonton could easily win and bring the Cup back home. But if they do, merely having the edge with McDavid as the best player in the series probably won’t be enough to put them over the top. His teammates will have to play their very best, too — erasing Florida’s advantage as an overall squad — if the Oilers are going to skate away with a championship this month.
Filed under: NHL
I used scare-quotes because technically it wasn’t a merger, at least not in the same sense as the NFL-AFL or NBA-ABA mergers. (The NHL refused to absorb any of the records from the WHA, and considered the old league’s teams to be expansion clubs when they joined the NHL.) But colloquially, it’s still just easier to call it a merger.