What makes a Stanley Cup champion?
We understand the recipe well enough from a qualitative standpoint. A championship team needs a strong blend of finesse and grit so it can win track meets or wars of attrition. It needs clutch goaltending. It needs great finishers. It needs shutdown defensemen who can log 30 minutes a night. It needs depth. It needs veterans who “know how to win.”
But can we quantify the components of a winner in today’s NHL? Why not try to find out?
Out of pure curiosity, I broke down the past 10 Stanley Cup champions in various categories in search of meaningful correlations. What common traits do the best teams share? Can those characteristics predict the next Stanley Cup champ?
Team Size
What’s that they say about officials “putting the whistles away” during the Stanley Cup playoffs? The perception is that the bigger, heavier clubs get away with more in the postseason and are thus better equipped to make deeper Cup runs than the smaller squads. A team that can grind on the forecheck and win 2-1 games tends to translate to the playoffs better than a run-and-gun group.
Does that mean the most recent champs tend to be loaded with bruisers? Yes and no.
We can cross height off the prerequisite list. Per eliteprospects.com, Only two of the past 10 Cup winners ranked among the five tallest in the league. Six of them ranked in the bottom third in height. The average league rank in height among the past 10 champs: 18th.
Weight, on the other hand? That matters a ton, pun intended. Heavy hockey wins. Five of the past 10 champs ranked among the five heaviest teams in the NHL, and sit sat in the top 10. We saw a temporary shift from 2015-2017, when the Blackhawks and Pittsburgh Penguins won Cups with some of the smallest teams in the NHL and relied their speed. But the pendulum swung back after that. The past four championship teams have ranked seventh, fourth, third and first in average player weight.
Correlation: Very Strong (for player weight)
Top-10 Scorers
Does every champion need a superstar point accumulator, capable of carrying his team on any given night and making others around him better?
It appears that way. At first glance, we see that only five of the past 10 Cup winners had one or more players who cracked the top 10 in regular-season NHL scoring. It’s more like seven, however. In 2014-15, Patrick Kane was on a top-10 pace but missed the last quarter of the regular season with a broken collarbone. In 2021-22, Nikita Kucherov missed the entire regular season after hip surgery. Both players infamously parachuted onto their teams’ eventual-champion rosters for Game 1 of the postseason when their cap hits no longer counted. So most recent winners have boasted at least one go-to superstar forward.