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.

"What are the odds?" The Chances of a Canadian Team Winning the Stanley Cup Are Helped By 2021's Unique Playoff Structure

This season, due to the ongoing pandemic, the 2021 NHL division alignment's were changed, such that the 7 Canada teams only played eachother, including over the first 2 rounds of the Stanley Cup playoffs. Notably, no Canadian team has won the Cup since 1993 - a 26 season drought. 

This year's playoffs guarantee a team from Canada will make the semifinals - which of course increases the chance of that team making the Finals (something that's only happened 5 times since 1993), and subsequently winning it all. So how does this help (or hurt) the chances of a Canadian team finally winning the Cup again?

I'm looking to isolate the impact of the postseason format, so it's not as simple as proportionally taking the number of Canadian teams over the number of teams in the league each year (for example, when the league added 2 American teams in 1993-93, 8 Canada teams / 26 total teams = 31% Cup pre-playoffs). Since Canada teams have not been evenly spread across divisions (such as none in the Metropolitan), I want to start the analysis with the initial playoff field each year.

Just accounting for the number of Canadian playoff teams, the best chances since '93 have been 1996, 2004, 2015, and 2017, when 5 teams made the playoffs. Proportionally that would be a 31% chance - 5 / 16. Using this methodology, there is only a 0.23% chance that no Canadian team has won in the past 26 playoffs.

This divisional discrepancy affects the playoff matchups too - so I also broke down each round by seeding. The team with home ice and the higher seed is expected to win about 64% of the time, and calculating this across the entire playoffs identifies 2017 as the single best chance for a Canadian victor - 34%  that year. Using this methodology, there is only a 0.47% chance of no Canadian team winning it all since 1993.

As mentioned before, the impact this year comes from the guarantee of a team in the semifinals. So I took this a step further and looked at the odds of having no Canadian teams in the semifinals.

This ranges from 2016, when no Canadian teams made the playoffs, to 2017, when there was an 80% chance of having >= 1 Canadian team in the semis. More than one team can make it that far too, but this doesn't outweigh the fact that in no year is there a 100% chance of 1 team. If every semifinalist has a 25% of winning from there, this only shrinks the odds further (full table below). Using this methodology, there is a 2.06% chance of no Canadian team finishing their run as champions in the past 26 seasons.

Season	Count CAD	Odds 0 in Semis	Odds >= 1 in Semis	Odds Win
1994	4	31%	69%	17%
1995	4	31%	69%	17%
1996	5	34%	66%	17%
1997	3	61%	39%	10%
1998	3	61%	39%	10%
1999	3	36%	64%	16%
2000	3	47%	53%	13%
2001	4	40%	60%	15%
2002	4	40%	60%	15%
2003	4	31%	69%	17%
2004	5	26%	74%	19%
2006	4	31%	69%	17%
2007	3	36%	64%	16%
2008	3	47%	53%	13%
2009	3	47%	53%	13%
2010	3	47%	53%	13%
2011	2	55%	45%	11%
2012	2	55%	45%	11%
2013	4	31%	69%	17%
2014	1	85%	15%	4%
2015	5	26%	74%	19%
2016	0	100%	0%	0%
2017	5	20%	80%	20%
2018	2	55%	45%	11%
2019	3	36%	64%	16%
2020	3	61%	39%	10%

Across all three methodologies, there are not many occurrences of Canada having a better than 1 in 4 chance to win it all. Even when considering the outcomes where more than 1 Canada teams reach the semifinals, the downside chance of no Canada team making it that far greatly reduced their odds in any given year. In this context, having at least a 1 in 4 shot at winning the Cup this year represents one of the best opportunities in almost 3 decades.

Season	Count CAD	Proportion Odds	Home/Away Odds	Home/Away, Semis-On Odds
1994	4	25%	25%	17%
1995	4	25%	25%	17%
1996	5	31%	24%	17%
1997	3	19%	11%	10%
1998	3	19%	11%	10%
1999	3	19%	21%	16%
2000	3	19%	16%	13%
2001	4	25%	20%	15%
2002	4	25%	20%	15%
2003	4	25%	25%	17%
2004	5	31%	29%	19%
2006	4	25%	25%	17%
2007	3	19%	21%	16%
2008	3	19%	16%	13%
2009	3	19%	16%	13%
2010	3	19%	16%	13%
2011	2	13%	13%	11%
2012	2	13%	13%	11%
2013	4	25%	25%	17%
2014	1	6%	4%	4%
2015	5	31%	29%	19%
2016	0	0%	0%	0%
2017	5	31%	34%	20%
2018	2	13%	13%	11%
2019	3	19%	21%	16%
2020	3	19%	11%	10%

Denver's Home Field + Home Ice Advantage (NBA/NHL)

Previously I wrote on diminishing home court/home ice advantage in the NBA and NHL, and how this might not hurt teams as much as it used to for this season's abnormal neutral site playoff arrangement.

One exception to this might be the Denver Nuggets and Colorado Avalanche - both teams play in the Pepsi Center in Denver, at altitude. Previous studies have shown that Denver teams have a considerably higher home field advantage, but specifically I'm aiming to see how it will affect this season's playoffs.

Unfortunately, there isn't enough data to go off of for these two teams in just playoff games (Nuggets have had 30 home playoff games over the past 10 years; Avalanche have had 20). So I used a simple methodology to isolate each season's home advantage: subtracting each team's home margin minus their road margin, divided by 2. This removes the effect of each team's strength in each season (i.e. if a certain team is very strong both at home and on the road, the difference between the two is their actual home court advantage).


Over the past 10 seasons, the Nuggets have averaged a home court advantage of 2.48, which is slightly lower than the total NBA average of 2.91. The difference though is that the Nuggets' HFA has increased recently, countering the overall trend - 4.7 in 2019-20 (NBA average: 2.17) and 6.92 in 2018-19 (NBA average: 2.79).



The same pattern holds true for the Avalanche: averaging a home ice advantage of 0.24 goals over the past 10 seasons, vs the total NHL average of 0.28. Yet, their trend is going up recently: 0.37 in 2019-20 (NHL average: 0.24) and 0.302 in 2018-19 (NHL average 0.303).

In both cases, it does seem the Denver-based teams will lose more than the average team by missing out on home field advantage in this year's playoffs, with the Nuggets holding the 3 seed in the West and the Avalanche with the 2 seed.