The NHL Playoffs Are Down to Eight — Including (Somehow) the Jets. But the Cup Is Up for Grabs.
While the Presidents' Trophy-winning Winnipeg Jets survived, the 2025 Stanley Cup chase is as open — and unpredictable — as ever.
For a long while on Sunday night, it looked like the Vegas oddsmakers knew something about the Winnipeg Jets all along… and maybe the staunch believers in Presidents’ Trophy curses did, too. (And my numbers, um, didn’t.) Or perhaps that, in the high-stakes game of postseason goaltending, Connor Hellebuyck was simply incapable of playing to his regular-season form during the playoffs.
However, the Winnipeg Jets staged a stunning comeback to force overtime — and then win (nearly two full OT periods later) — to avert an equally stunning seven-game defeat in Round 1 against the underdog St. Louis Blues. So the league’s top regular season team and pre-playoff statistical favorite to win the Stanley Cup is still alive. That might not mean the 2025 NHL playoffs are any less unpredictable than they already seemed to be, though.
If the Jets had been unceremoniously bounced out of contention, it not only would have added to the recent woes for Presidents’ Trophy winners. A Blues win would have also blown the playoff picture wide open, with a new favorite and a bunched-up field of remaining contenders according to my Elo Rating-based simulations. As it is, though, the Jets are still the favorites — with solid odds to win the Cup (23 percent) relative to the field — even after accounting for their shaky performance against the Blues, because their power rating is still fairly strong from the season overall.
Seven NHL games don’t tell us too much about the true quality of a team, even in the playoffs, so in a vacuum it would probably be wrong to read too much into Hellebuyck’s inconsistent play and Winnipeg’s brush with elimination, which was about as close as any team can come to suffering a humiliating upset without actually going home early.
But obviously, we still have a lot of questions about the Jets’ ceiling going forward. The Dallas Stars, whom Winnipeg will face in Round 2, survived their own tough, seven-game first-round test against the Colorado Avalanche by way of a remarkable comeback. Dallas is loaded up and fully capable of winning the Cup — they will pose an even bigger challenge than the Blues did.
On paper, the Stars went from a potential 60-40 matchup with the Blues to a 40-60 matchup against Winnipeg, making them one of the biggest losers of Sunday’s Game 7. (Aside from St. Louis, that is.) But all of those doubts the bookmakers had about Winnipeg going into the playoffs have only intensified after the Jets’ first-round struggles; Dallas opened as a -164 favorite to win the series on Sunday night, even though Winnipeg will have home-ice advantage. (For whatever that is worth.)
Add in plenty of key injuries, and Hellebuyck and his Jets still have plenty to prove, even if the Blues didn’t knock them off to explode a massive grenade right in the middle of the playoff landscape.
Meanwhile, the rest of the playoff field is as compressed as ever, with all of the non-Winnipeg teams bunched between 8 percent and 14 percent Cup odds, according to the Elo forecast. Even the teams at the bottom of the odds list are dangerous.
The Washington Capitals, for instance, have the lowest title odds of any remaining team — in part because of some lopsided late-season losses (when they might have been a bit distracted). But the Caps had the third-best SRS of any team in hockey this year, and they handled Montreal with relative ease in Round 1. If that’s the worst this round has to offer,1 we are looking once again at one of the best “Elite Eights” in recent NHL history — even if its average Elo (1564) is down slightly from last year’s record mark of 1581.
That means the Jets are far from sure favorites, particularly after the shakiest of shaky Round 1 performances we might have ever seen from a Presidents’ Trophy team that actually ended up hanging on to win the series. Winnipeg may have lived to fight another day — but the 2025 Stanley Cup sure feels like anyone’s to take home now.
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And I’m not sure it is, as those late regular-season losses might have unfairly docked Washington Elo points. But such is the nature of power rating systems.
How do the Hurricanes odds drop so dramatically with a Jets victory? And related, why do Eastern Conference teams chances of reaching the Finals fluctuate based on the Jets/Blues series?