The Boston Bruins Are Cursed! (Maybe.)
Winning the President's Trophy has a bad reputation. But is it deserved?
The Boston Bruins skate into the 2023 NHL playoffs as heavy a favorite as we’ve seen in recent history. Boston set numerous NHL records for dominance this year, including winning the most games (65) and earning the most points (135) by any team in a single season ever. According to a lot of observers, the only thing that might stop the Bruins from steamrolling their way to the Stanley Cup is a longstanding curse associated with a hockey team being too good.
Obviously, Boston’s record-setting season meant they had the league’s best record this year — giving them the not-so-coveted President’s Trophy for their trouble. Why is this piece of hardware so reviled? Simply put, there is the widespread perception that its recipients consistently flop in the playoffs. Despite signifying the league’s top regular-season team, only 8 of its 36 winners (22.2%) have gone on to win the Stanley Cup since it was first awarded for the 1985-86 season. (Naturally, the first winners, the Edmonton Oilers, were toppled in the playoffs when defenseman Steve Smith banked the puck into his own net off his goalie’s skate while trying to make a pass.)
The curse has been especially strong in recent years. No President’s Trophy recipient has taken the Cup since the 2012-13 Chicago Blackhawks, meaning nine consecutive winners have failed to win the championship. Zooming out a bit more, only two winners since 2002-03 went on to lift the Cup, so the curse is currently riding a 17-for-19 hot streak going into the 2023 playoffs.
But there is a counter-explanation that doesn’t involve curses: The hockey playoffs are just random. Even among a group of the best teams from their respective seasons, we shouldn’t necessarily expect a high rate of championship success because the best team usually does not win in the NHL. And in fact, if we account for how often we would expect President’s Trophy winners to hoist the Cup — via a logistic regression using pre-playoff Elo ratings — their collective success rate is (surprisingly) not that low. Compared with the 8 teams who actually won, we would have expected just 8.2 Cup wins for President’s Trophy teams since ‘86, a minor shortfall at most.
It is true that this group is running at a deficit recently. Since that Blackhawks victory in 2013, we would have expected 1.9 additional titles for President’s Trophy winners; instead, they’ve added zero Cup wins. But before this recent dry spell, President’s Trophy winners were actually running at a surplus over the award’s history. And even now, there’s no real predictive value to including a regression variable for winning the trophy after accounting for regular-season Elo ratings. It tells us nothing that we didn’t already know.
The notion of a curse — which dates back to at least the 1990s, in my memory — seems to stem mainly from two factors: A few high-profile flops by historic teams (see the 2018-19 Tampa Bay Lightning’s first-round sweep after tying the all-time wins record), and a misconception about how often the top NHL teams should win relative to other sports leagues. Hockey is so chaotic that we can’t hold its best teams to the same standard as we do in, say, basketball — and we should probably stop pretending otherwise.
What does all of this mean for the Bruins? Well, the FiveThirtyEight model considers them better than 50-50 to make the Cup Final, so a failure to make a deep playoff run would certainly be a disappointment — and more fuel for the curse’s believers. But this is still hockey, and Boston is still more likely to fall short of the championship than to win it. You don’t need to believe in magic to understand why.