Will the Hockey Gods Again Unleash the Presidents’ Trophy Curse?

In the NHL, the Boston Bruins have been impressing week after week, putting up more goals, points, and wins to get them on pace to smash new records. However, the NHL is notoriously the North American league with the most unpredictable postseason.

The winner of the regular season gets the Presidents’ Trophy. Over 36 seasons to date, this prize has gone to the team that has proven to be the very best in the league format of play. Once each playoff series has been decided, it’s invariably the Presidents’ Trophy winner who leads the favorites in the odds unless major injuries occur late.

Even with this logical perception, the Presidents’ Trophy is a poor indicator of playoff readiness, it seems. Of the 36 Trophy winners, only eight have gone on to hoist the Stanley Cup as the ultimate champions of the campaign. The Bruins may well beat records for their regular season efforts, but that’ll help little in the postseason.

A superb effort from the Boston Bruins in 2022/23

It’s impossible to deny that the Boston Bruins have been an exemplary hockey team throughout the 2022/23 campaign. With just 12 games to go, the team had long secured a playoff place while not a single other team had done so, boasted an absurd +114 goal differential, and a record of 42-11-5 through 70 games.

As the end of the campaign approached, statisticians ran the numbers to attempt to predict if the Bruins would become new record-holders. As relayed by Sporting News, they were projected to end with 130 points and finish two away from the leading tally of the Canadiens in 1976/77, and even beat the 63-win record of the 2018/19 Tampa Bay Lightning.

Such an almighty season – even if they were to drop off from their indomitable .807 point percentage – has inevitably given the supposed Presidents’ Trophy winners a considerable lead in the odds at +375 over their nearest rivals. That team is the Colorado Avalanche at +700 from the opposite conference – so they wouldn’t need to meet the Bruins until the Stanley Cup Finals.

What’s important is how prepared the team is for the rigors of the playoffs. They are intense, physical, and mentally draining affairs, requiring each player to up their game immensely. This is why a Stanley Cup betting strategy is to rely on a team’s playoff performance. Factors like leading player injuries, away records, experience, and lapses in focus or physical endurance all matter tremendously, as are those known to blossom in the playoffs.

In this regard, bar a complete collapse in the final stretch, the Bruins look well-set for a strong postseason run. This is a team punctuated by veterans who have gone deep into the playoffs before, which will prove invaluable. As for stats, David Pastrnak, Brad Marchand, Jake DeBrusk, and Charlie Coyle all average over 1.00 goals per 60 minutes in all situations during playoff games. Patrice Bergeron and Taylor Hall aren’t far behind.

As for points per 60 minutes in all situations of playoff games, per the QuantHockey statistics, Pastrnak (3.3), Marchand (2.6), David Krejci (2.5), Bergeron (2.3), Coyle (1.97), DeBrusk (1.8), Hall (1.7), Tomáš Nosek (1.4), and Charlie McAvoy (1.3) all clearly flourish under postseason pressure. However, there are question marks over the goaltending.

Linus Ullmark isn’t just having a good season: he’s having a remarkable one. Through 42 starts, the towering Swede has secured a 35-5-1 record bolstered by a strong 1.95 goals against average and superb .937 save percentage. Helping is that he’s only recorded two shutouts to swing those numbers. He’s been consistently consistent.

However, looming over Ullmark as the playoffs approach is his distinct lack of experience. His only games in the postseason to date are two starts last season, both of which ended in losses to total eight goals against. His understudy, Jeremy Swayman, has a bit more experience at only 24 years old, recording a 3-3 record from five starts.

Goaltenders are, perhaps, the most important players on the ice for hockey teams. A hot hand can make even an outskirts contender become a Stanley Cup winner. Ullmark has had a hot hand for much of the season, but if he crumbles when the business end of the campaign commences, it’s fair to say that this Bruins side will struggle to secure enough wins across each series.

In 2019, just after the Lightning posted a record-tying wins tally to land the Presidents’ Trophy, Tampa Bay collapsed in its entirety. Coming up against a late entrant, the Bolts were expected to obliterate the Columbus Blue Jackets in the opening series. Instead, the team proved ill-adjusted to adverse results. Superstar goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy put up a .856 save percentage out of nowhere, and they bowed out as 0-4 losers in the first round.

Which teams could capitalize on a potential Bruins implosion?

The first teams to get a swing at the expectations-laden Bruins will be from the Eastern Conference. Assuming that they’ll be the Presidents’ Trophy winners, the Bruins will likely face the Florida Panthers, New York Islanders, or Pittsburgh Penguins first.

Both the Islanders and Panthers enter their last ten games with excellent momentum, but the former notoriously struggles for goals while the latter has allowed by far the highest tally of any playoff contender. If they stay true to form, the league leader in both goals for and goals against shouldn’t have any issues with either side.

Looking deeper into the possible playoff brackets, you could certainly class the star-studded Toronto Maple Leafs or recent back-to-back champions, the Lightning, as top contenders to the crown from Boston’s conference. The Buds, particularly, have a high mountain to climb here as they haven’t won in the first round of the playoffs in any of their last six attempts – each of which has come in the last six seasons.

Via the Metropolitan Division, there’s a heated race for the top between the Carolina Hurricanes and New Jersey Devils, but the New York Rangers are certainly an interesting team to follow. After the trade deadline, the top six are overly stacked, adding Vladimir Tarasenko and Patrick Kane to the likes of Artemi Panarin, Mika Zibanejad, and Vincent Trocheck.

Those two lines can score multiple goals against any team in any game, and their defense has held up fairly well throughout the season with only 194 goals against in 71 games. Momentum coming into the playoffs and a shortened opening series could make the Rangers a real threat to go to the Stanley Cup playoffs.

On the other side of the bracket, the reigning champions, the Colorado Avalanche, have swiftly re-entered the equation. After going 20-17-3 through to January, the Avs suddenly switched on – mostly due to the return of major players who were injured – to rip off three separate six-game winning streaks up to their 70th game of the season.

These runs saved the campaign for the Avs and reasserted them as the team to beat in the Western Conference. A sneaky contender in their Central Division, however, will be looking to stop them quickly. The Dallas Stars have been defensively sound this season, and have scored plenty of goals, but there are fears that they’ve overworked Jake Oettinger due to his performances falling off the pace towards the backend of the season.

Given their two star players, the Edmonton Oilers will remain in the conversation to finally win the Stanley Cup again. Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl are hotter than ever, Mattias Ekholm has solidified the defense in a very short time, and the lower lines are putting up goals – so it’s not just about McDavid carrying the team. Again, however, goaltending will be brought into question when the first series commences.

After such an imperious regular season, it makes sense that most see the Boston Bruins going all the way in 2023, but if they did so, they’d be among the minority to defy the curse of the Presidents’ Trophy.