NHL Playoffs 2023 Bracket Math

Coming off a record-breaking and code-breaking regular season, the Boston Bruins would seem to be the hands-down, head-and-shoulders above favorites to win the Stanley Cup.

But hockey is similar to baseball in that even the best teams can easily fall to variance in a 7 game series. So I compiled a few different models to simulate the Stanley Cup playoffs for this season.

The model is a compilation of:

• Dom Luszczyszyn of The Athletic, one of the best hockey modelers out there
• HockeyViz by Micah Blake McCurdy, another of the best hockey modelers
• Pythagorean expectation, the standard goals for/goals against calculation I've been using for a decade (this component has the lowest weighting)

First, a disclaimer - hockey is not my specialty, and in contrast to my very good NBA model, my NHL attempts were awful in 2019 (my 8th most likely champion won it) and 2014 (my 6th most likely champion won).

Based on my new model, the Boston Bruins have gotten dare I say... extremely lucky?

Their rating is very good - but not the best team in the league, and a stone's throw from being the third best team in the East.

And they go up against one of the best offenses in the league in the first round, the Florida Panthers. Increased variance!

I have Carolina as much stronger on paper than Boston, but Boston is still your second most likely champion, and each first round East matchup features a pretty heavy favorite. Nowhere near as much as some of other sites, such as Playoff Status, which has Boston as a 95% favorite in round 1. Even for as dominant a team as Boston, that seems aggressive.

Round 1 Boston/Florida odds:

• Playoff Status: 95%
• Dom at The Athletic: 71%
• MDS Model: 67%
• HockeyViz: 65%

One of Carolina, Boston, and Edmonton are likely to lift the cup.

Additionally, no Canadian team has won the Cup since 1993, and there is only an 18% chance that ends this year, with Edmonton carrying 11% of that probability.

NBA Playoffs 2023 Bracket Math (Post Play-In)

The NBA playoff field is set, and as expected, the 7 and 8 seeds in each conference ultimately made the playoffs - just not in the order we expected with Atlanta/Miami.

Miami and Minnesota (the two finalized 8 seeds) are both easily the weakest teams in the postseason, with both rating worse than an "average" .500 team.

As such, both 1 seeds get easier routes out of the first round, which really helps Milwaukee - however, with Boston being the (slightly) stronger team, we now end up with the weird wrinkle where Milwaukee is marginally more likely to make the Finals, but Boston is the single most likely champion. In short, it's a coin flip between Milwaukee and Boston out of the East, and as the likely winner.

There will likely be a champion out of Boston, Milwaukee, and Phoenix, in that order, with Memphis the only other team with better tan a 1 in 10 chance to win the whole thing.

This is the most parity the postseason has had in years - even more so than the 2020 bubble.

NBA Playoffs 2023 Bracket Math

Last year's Eastern Conference playoffs showed how a stronger team can overcome not having home-court advantage, which the Boston Celtics ultimately did, as projected.

And going in to the play-in games, both conferences' 9 and 10 seeds have a higher model rating than their respective 8 seed. The wrinkle is, having to win two games instead of one is really hard - especially with the second being on the road. So even being the "weaker" team, the 8 seed has a huge advantage, and both make the playoffs ~3/4th of the time:

Should these results hold, the 1 and 2 seeds in each conference still shouldn't have much difficulty in the first round. Milwaukee, Boston, Denver, and Memphis are all significantly stronger (and have home court) over any of the possible 7 or 8 seeds:

I'll update this after the play-in games are done, but as it stands, it's better than 50/50 that one of Boston, Milwaukee, and Phoenix will win the title.