This Might Be the NHL’s Most Competitive Final Four Ever

While other leagues spiral into chaos, the NHL has delivered a Final Four so evenly matched, it’s basically a four-way coin flip.

While its NBA cousins are in the midst of a whiplash-inducing postseason that has been uncharacteristically chaotic so far — yet might also be oddly predictable going forward — the NHL has skated its way to a Final Four that, well, mostly makes sense.

Sure, the top-seeded Winnipeg Jets became the latest victim of the Presidents’ Trophy Curse, part of a second round that saw all four division winners fall simultaneously (just the second time that’s ever happened). But the teams that did advance — the Carolina Hurricanes, Florida Panthers, Dallas Stars and Edmonton Oilers — were three of the four conference finalists last season.¹ And they’re all either the defending champs (Florida) or a trio of teams we’ve been waiting to see hoist the Cup for a while now. There are no Cinderellas here.

Because of this, the conference finals begin Tuesday night with each team bunched between 22 and 29 percent Stanley Cup odds in my NHL Elo forecast model, and with each series essentially looking like a coin flip — matchup odds of 52-48 (for Carolina) in the East and 51-49 (for Edmonton) in the West. It’s just about as close as these things can ever get:

This squares with the prediction markets as well — here are Polymarket’s Cup odds going into Canes-Panthers Game 1:

Some of that is due to the nature of hockey itself: as a more random sport, there is less separation to be had between the favorite and the underdog, producing less certain predictions. If hockey were perfectly random and there was no skill difference at all between the Canes, Cats, Stars and Oilers, the distribution of Cup odds would be 25-25-25-25. And we’re not too far off from that.

But that balance can be achieved by a closely matched group of really good teams as well, which is what we’re currently looking at — perhaps more so than in any NHL “Final Four” of the modern era.