The President’s Trophy Curse: Is It Real?

Every year, the NHL’s teams play 82 games during eight months for the chance to compete in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. However, a special award for the team with the best record over the regular season is called the President’s Trophy. Created in the 1985-86 season, it has had 39 winners since its inception, including this year’s winner, the Winnipeg Jets. The only year since 1986 it hasn’t been awarded to a team was in 2004-05 during the NHL lockout season.

Naturally, you would assume that most of the time, the regular-season winner would continue their dominance in the playoffs and win the Stanley Cup. However, this hasn’t been the case, especially in recent history, which has begged the question: Is there a President’s Trophy Curse?

Does Regular Season Success Correlate with Playoffs?

From the introduction of the trophy in 1986 until 2024, we looked at the data to see how the President’s Trophy winners performed come playoff time, and the results were shocking.

The most common outcome seen was a 2nd round loss. Even more shocking was that the team with the best regular season record was eliminated in the first round of the playoffs the same number of times as they went on to win the Stanley Cup. In fact, over 50% of the time, the President’s Trophy winner loses in the first 2 rounds. How is this possible, given such success in the regular season?

Does the Curse Follow Other Sports?

It’s difficult to compare these regular-season and playoff results in other leagues because of playoff formats and games played. The MLB plays 162 regular-season games, which makes its sample size much bigger, and the NFL plays much fewer, at 17. The closest comparison we can get is a league that also plays 82 regular-season games and has 4 playoff rounds at a best-of-7: the NBA.

Comparing the two leagues, the data is surprising. The winner of the regular season in the NBA has more than double the chance to win the finals at a staggering 44.7% chance, given the historical data. While the NBA has 1 extra season of data due to no lockout seasons, it has no significant impact on the results. We can clearly see that NBA regular season performance correlates much better with playoff success than the NHL. Why do these leagues have such drastic differences in team success during the postseason? They are two very different sports, so there are too many variables to investigate, but this clearly hints that the curse is real.

Results Over Time

When looking at how these winners have done over the years, we see that since 2013, the last time a President’s Trophy winner won the Cup, the regular season winner hasn’t even made the finals since. This doesn’t seem to be random, however, as one major playoff format rule was introduced the year after the Chicago Blackhawks won the Cup in 2013, that being the introduction of the new divisional playoff formats.

First let’s go back to look at the beginning of the trophy’s history. For 1986-98, the playoffs were conference-based seeding. This means the 1st seed in the conference plays the 8th seed, the 2nd plays the 7th, and so forth. This evenly matched teams throughout the conference. During this time, we saw 3 Stanley Cup winners come from President’s Trophy winners and only 1 first-round exit. In the next 26 years, we only saw 5 more Stanley Cup winners and 7 first-round exits. What changed in the 1998-99 season was the introduction of divisional seeding. Divisional seeding worked in the following way for the 1st round in each conference:

Eastern Conference
Series A: #1 (Division Winner) vs. #8
Series B: #2 (Division Winner) vs. #7
Series C: #3 (Division Winner) vs. #6
Series D: #4 vs. #5

Teams that won their divisions can get a higher seed than if it were solely conference-based. For example, if you came 7th in the conference but first in the worst division, now you can have an easier matchup by having to play the 6 seed instead of the true 2 seed. This means that if you are the 1 seed, you might not actually play a true 8 seed if the conference 8 seed plays in a weak division and gets themselves a higher seed. This has led to an imbalance in playoff seedings. Now, the league somewhat compensated for this by re-seeding after the 1st round of playoffs so that the highest-seed winner would play the lowest-seed winner in the next round.

That was up until the 2013-14 season. That year, the league reduced the number of divisions to 2, making it so that the top 3 teams in each division make playoffs, with the 2-to 3 seeds in the division playing each other while the winners of the division played the following best 2 teams in the conference regardless of division, known as the wildcards. However, teams would no longer get re-seeded after round 1, making it more likely that the best team in the conference or the league would have a higher chance of facing a more formidable opponent.

Over time, we have seen the playoff format become less favourable to the best team in the conference/league, making their path through the playoffs harder and lessening the chances of them winning the Cup over time. Remember the playoff format that led to the best results for the President’s Trophy Winner of the 1-8 conference-based seeding? Well, that’s the same format the NBA currently uses and has been shown to lead to a strong correlation between regular season and playoff success.

Other Potential Factors

Regular Season Length

The NHL regular season has been shortened a few times due to lockouts or pandemics. The league has had 2 shortened lockout seasons in this timeframe, in 1994-95 and in 2004-05. In these two seasons, the regular season winner made the finals both times, even winning in 2005. The pandemic shortened seasons, however, resulting in 1st and 2nd round exits for the President’s Trophy Winners. You could argue that giving the teams a shorter season and more rest could help the best teams stay healthy and compete at their best for playoffs.

The Salary Cap Era

The NHL introduced the salary cap in the 2005-06 season because of the 2004-05 NHL lockout. This limited how much teams could spend on their players, restricting how much top-end talent and depth they could add. Before this was implemented from 1986-2004 (05’ was the lockout year), the average length of playoff rounds advanced for the President’s Trophy Winner was 3.3. Since the salary cap was created, that has been decreased by an entire round to make the average length of playoff rounds advanced, 2.3 rounds. The inability of teams to load up their rosters towards the end of the year and prepare for playoffs has been a massive challenge for top, but it also allows for a more competitive environment for small market teams.

2025 Playoffs

With the 1st round of the playoffs officially ending on May 4th, this year’s President’s Trophy Winner, the Winnipeg Jets, have narrowly avoided the curse for at least the first round. Having won in double overtime in game 7, they showed some weaknesses, and many challenges are ahead. According to the data, a 2nd round elimination is their most likely outcome. Still, as we have seen in the past, hockey is an unpredictable game that throws excitement at us throughout the playoffs. Many consider the Stanley Cup the hardest trophy to win in North American sports, and it looks like it’s more difficult nowadays than ever.

Will the Jets break the curse for the first time in 12 years, or will they fall like so many of their predecessors? Is there even a curse out there, or has the evolution of the league and its rules just created a more competitive power dynamic in the league?