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.
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