We’re about halfway through the NHL season and the battle for the Stanley Cup is set to intensify in the second half of the campaign.
Here we look at the format of the playoffs, the recent history of the Stanley Cup finals and the chances of the Canadian teams in the 2022 season.
What is the Stanley Cup?
The Stanley Cup is the trophy awarded to the winner of each season’s NHL championship winners. The title is decided by a playoff series featuring the 16 best-performing teams in the regular season. The regular season usually runs from October to April, with the playoffs then taking place from April to June.
How do the playoffs work?
The top three teams in each of the four divisions qualify for the playoffs, along with the next two highest-placed teams in each conference. The eight teams from each conference then play out a standard bracket – with each tie a best-of-seven series – until one from each remains to contest the Stanley Cup Finals.
Who has the best playoff record?
There are nine teams who have reached the playoffs in at least seven of the last 10 seasons. Three of them – the Pittsburgh Penguins, the St Louis Blues and the Washington Capitals – have only missed out once in the last decade and all are on course to make it again this time around.
Defending champions the Tampa Bay Lightning have made it to the postseason in seven of their last eight attempts and five of those have seen them reach the Conference Finals or better.
Does regular-season performance matter?
If we divide the last 20 Stanley Cup Finals into two sequences of 10, an interesting pattern emerges. All 10 finals from 2001-2011 featured at least one team that had finished first in their division, eight of whom would go on to win. However, eight of the last 10 finals – from 2012 to 2021 – have been won by a team who did not top their division that season.
Can Tampa Bay make it three in a row?
The Tampa Bay Lightning have won each of the last two Stanley Cup Finals and are bidding to become the fifth team to win at least three in a row. This would equal the achievements of the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1949 and 1964, but they would remain short of the fourth successive title won by the New York Islanders in 1983 and the fifth consecutive Stanley Cup that the Montreal Canadiens claimed in 1960.
The Lightning are the 15th team to win back-to-back NHL championships, but it has been getting harder to turn a pair of titles into a run of three. Each of the last five teams who attempted to win their third Stanley Cup in a row failed to even reach the Conference finals.
Will a Canadian team lift the Stanley Cup?
When the Montreal Canadiens won the Stanley Cup in 1993, they became the 45th Canadian winner out of a possible 74 in the NHL era. This was the last time the trophy went to a team from Canada though, with all of the 27 subsequent champions based in the United States.
Canadian teams have continued to put in strong performances however, with five of the seven currently in the NHL having reached the Stanley Cup Finals since 1993 and the other two appearing in at least one Conference Finals.
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