In thirteen minutes of hockey time, the Boston Bruins went from being the Stanley Cup favorites to being eliminated. It was only the first round.
The final two acts of the Bruins’ collapse were the least shocking in the moment, but only because of how ominous the first three acts had combined to be. The second game was odd, and it was concerning, with Linus Ullmark allowing a shocking six goals, but it was only one game, so it felt like heat lightning. After Ullmark’s Game 5 foible, the clouds were building, and the Panthers’ scoring outburst in Game 6 showed rain was coming. Even then, though, the Bruins felt secure to those of us watching through the lens of things like spreadsheets and betting odds. They were the home team for Game 7, and Ullmark was far from the only good thing about this team. When the Panthers emptied the net, I thought the Bruins would find it, put the game on ice, and breathe a big sigh of relief, having escaped the pressure their season had built. Instead, those who’d been calling for a tornado since those first flashes of electricity were proven correct. Now, the roof’s gone.
A fair question being asked right now is whether it’s good to win the Presidents’ Trophy. The last time a team won it and made it past the second round was 2015. The last time a team won it and won the Cup was ten years ago. This is a dramatic trend.
A second fair question being asked right now is whether the NHL should consider a change to its playoff format. Of course, the answer is no—the Bruins loss, by a lot of measures, outshone Steph Curry scoring fifty points yesterday in an elimination game in the attention market—but the real question within there is valid, and that question is, “Is this sport too random to have this many teams in the playoffs?”
The answer to that last piece is probably yes. Hockey’s playoffs definitely devalue the regular season to an extent. It’s not as big a problem as that of the NBA, because the final spots in the Stanley Cup Playoffs are so valuable, but the crapshoot nature of the postseason is rough. It’s like baseball’s, this way. We agree to each format because each postseason is so exciting, but the Bruins’ loss is a lot like the Mariners’ in 2001, the key difference being that nobody was or is sick of Seattle winning, so that was less enjoyable for the average fan. On one hand, adjusting to how different the postseason is from the regular season is part of the deal, and franchises in both the NHL and MLB should be cognizant of what wins in the playoffs if they’re trying to build a champion, but that can only be done to an extent. The situation doesn’t make the playoffs worse, but it makes the word “champion” mean less than it means in, say, college football conference play.
With the first question, though, the answer is still no. It’s good to win the Presidents’ Trophy. This is weird, this is wild, this is very strange, but in the last 15 normal playoffs (excluding the four-division 2021 season and 2020, when Covid induced a seeding tournament), Presidents’ Trophy winners have won just as many Stanley Cups as their conference runners-up, and they’ve won more than the champions of the other conference. Here are the numbers heading into this postseason. The best teams in the league just lose. It’s how the sport works.
| Result\Team | Presidents’ Trophy Winner | Other Conference Champion | Presidents’ Trophy Winner’s Conference Runner-Up |
| Lost in First Round | 5 | 2 | 4 |
| Lost in Second Round | 5 | 7 | 5 |
| Lost Conference Finals | 2 | 5 | 2 |
| Lost Stanley Cup Finals | 1 | 0 | 2 |
| Won Stanley Cup | 2 | 1 | 2 |
It’s a small sample, and we’d do well to go back further, but even if we did forty years of this, it’s unlikely we’d find something statistically significant. It’s a fun narrative, and it’s a weird jinx, and hockey—like baseball—is at its best when there are fun narrative and weird jinxes in the air. But if the choice is between winning the Presidents’ Trophy and losing it, it’s obviously better to win.
What went wrong for the Bruins? Something, maybe, and we’ll get to that in a moment. But the bigger problem for Boston was that they play in a sport where you have to win four straight seven-game series to win the title, and unlike the other sport with that format, each of those four series are consistently expected to be competitive.
Offense vs. Defense
As promised moments ago:
What went wrong for the Bruins themselves?
The ideas are tempting that Boston’s regular season excellence wore them down, or that every hockey team has its peak and the trick is peaking at the right time. The ideas are tempting, but they’re ethereal. There’s no great way to measure them. Two different possibilities come from the reality that the Bruins were a better defensive team than they were on the offensive side of the ice.
Entering the first game of these Stanley Cup Playoffs, the Bruins had an Ogelo of 2.96 and a Dgelo of 2.58. The 2.58 number was strong. In our Gelo system, 3.05 was the average for Ogelo and Dgelo at the end of the season, and something 47 points in the right direction of average is remarkable. The Oilers, right now, are 31 points above average overall. The Bruins were 50% better than that on the defensive end alone.
The 2.96 number isn’t terrible. The Bruins were 9 points below average on the offensive end. They were better offensively entering the playoffs than either the Stars or Hurricanes are now, and both those teams got through the first round.
Still, the defense didn’t work, and now, the two remaining conference favorites—the Oilers and the Leafs—have Dgelo’s of 3.35 and 3.24, respectively, 30 and 19 points worse than average, the Oilers grading out as just as “bad” defensively as they are good overall.
I put “bad” in scare quotes for a reason here, and I want to add an important caveat: Gelo only works off of goals scored, and Ogelo and Dgelo are only designed to predict how many goals will be scored in total in each game. The Oilers might be better on defense than they’re given credit for being because of stylistic elements. It’s not the same as how tempo works in basketball, but one way to conceptualize this is that because the Oilers are so good at scoring goals, their opponents often fall behind, then sacrifice defense for offense in an attempt to catch up, something that inflates both the Oilers’ Ogelo and their Dgelo in a circular combined effect. This might not be the perfect explanation, but it’s the idea.
Anyway, the Bruins were a good defensive team, and the Oilers and the Leafs are good offensive teams, and the good offensive teams are still playing while the good defensive team went home. Is there something there?
The first possibility, if an explanation does exist in this realm, is that defense is harder to sustain than offense. One possibility here is that good defense, in hockey, relies heavily on one man performing extremely well. More so than in any other sport, scoring prevention in hockey falls on one person, and that person is the goaltender. Linus Ullmark had help, but he had to do a whole lot himself. When he started to play worse, possibly because he was playing hurt, the effect was dramatic.
The second possibility, if said explanation exists, is that it’s simply better to be good at offense in the playoffs than it is to be good at defense. Maybe good offense, in hockey, simply beats good defense. Maybe this is why it was possible in the first place for the Oilers to become twice as “good” offensively, per Gelo, as the Bruins were good defensively.
Ultimately, this is all suspect. We’re working with a small sample, we’re using a rating system in a rather warped way, and it’s easy to look at a team that just collapsed and focus on their construction as the reason for the collapse, rather than acknowledging that any team can break down in the right circumstances. This is not a pattern even in the way that the Presidents’ Trophy winners’ struggles are a pattern. But, it’s something to consider, and if it’s true and the NHL is an efficient market, it’ll eventually make hockey a whole lot of fun.
Other thoughts on the weekend, series by series:
- The Avalanche are getting lumped in with the Bruins as having cause to be embarrassed, and it’s true that they were likewise upset in Game 7, their fall coming after Philipp Grubauer turned away shot after shot after shot. The Avalanche’s problem was bigger than that of the Bruins, though, and their loss was therefore less of a surprise. Colorado just wasn’t as good as it was last year. You can get into individual players and overall schematics and external factors, but the overall answer isn’t as puzzling as it is with that of the Bruins. The Avalanche were reasonably likely to lose this series. The Avalanche lost this series.
- With the Kraken the ones advancing, the Stars are suddenly in the spotlight, favored to reach the Western Conference Semifinals entering tomorrow night’s Game 1. We wrote at some point last week about how invisible the Stars/Wild series felt, or rather that it felt like it was on an island apart from the rest of the Western Conference. The water has, I guess, given way.
- The Kings hung in there, but the Oilers were just too much, and after another classic out west, the Oilers take over as Stanley Cup favorites. At the moment, Gelo has Edmonton as the best team in the game, but it has the Knights as second-best, marginally better than the Leafs. There are paths to someone else being favored when this second round is over, but the most likely thing right now is that Oilers/Knights is the series of consequence these next two weeks.
- I’m afraid this will get published quite late (our Austin bureau is traveling), and that Game 7 will be underway or even potentially over by the time this reaches your screens, so if further developments have rendered this irrelevant, apologies. But. The Rangers’ revival against the Devils on Saturday was a great lesson in some of the fatal flaws of playoff narratives. After having no luck at all finding the net across Games 3, 4, and 5, New York bullied Akira Schmid, scoring five times on only 29 shots. We like to grasp small patterns in the playoffs in all sports in attempts to explain the results we’re seeing. Those patterns are real, but they’re small. In the regular season, we’d often fail to notice them. In the playoffs, they magnify, but they can turn on a dime.
- If you count Carolina winning the qualifying round in 2020, the Hurricanes have now won a playoff series in five straight seasons. If you don’t, they’ve still made the second round in four of five years, but they have only one conference finals appearance to show for it, and they were swept in that 2019 series. The franchise has been remarkably successful since relocating from Hartford. Are they due for their second Cup?
- And lastly, back across the bracket, the Leafs took one monkey off their back only to put another on. Toronto won its first playoff series this weekend in nearly twenty years, but they still haven’t made the Conference Finals since 2002, and they’ve neither made nor won the Stanley Cup Finals since 1967. For arguably hockey’s biggest brand, this is a bad drought. They now face last year’s Presidents’ Trophy winners, fresh off those winners taking down an historically good hockey team.
Steph Curry, Of Course
We overlooked him.
All series, we heard about the Warriors. The first-round stats were about the Warriors. The questions about approach tied back to the Warriors. Every piece of the narrative centered on the Warriors. In a way, this was refreshing, a counterpoint to the common complaint that modern basketball is too much about players and not enough about teams. This is the NBA, though. Individuals matter.
Steph Curry dropped fifty points in an elimination game, and through him, the Warriors moved on.
LeBron James is more physically impressive, and LeBron James has been more an icon within the sport of basketball, and I’ll concede that LeBron James is the better player. But Steph Curry has changed the sport like no one else, and he’s still playing, just like LeBron is. What a fun series that will be.
Other NBA thoughts:
- In a postseason with a lot of important body parts, Jimmy Butler’s ankle is suddenly the most important. Someone get Patrick Mahomes’s trainers to New York before Game 2 here.
- We’re still getting to know the Suns, as we keep pointing out in our bets as we fade them in NBA futures markets. Are they still getting to know each other? The whole isn’t as good as the sum of the parts yet.
Some Offense After All
We wrote on Friday that the Packers’ first-round pick was an endorsement of Jordan Love because it wasn’t spent on the offense. Does this mean that the Packers’ next three picks signified the opposite?
What we were saying on Friday wasn’t that teams who trust their quarterbacks don’t draft offensive players. What we were saying on Friday is that the Packers have a long history of valuing defensive players in the first round, and that to deviate from that would signify a lack of confidence in their quarterback. Taking three pass-catchers in the second and third rounds isn’t a huge departure from precedent. It sure should make the offense better, though.
We aren’t at the point where tight ends and wide receivers are necessarily a strength of the Packers, with Luke Musgrave, Tucker Kraft, and Jayden Reed now in the fold (not to mention Dontayvion Wicks and Grant DuBose), but the possibility of it being a strength is much higher than it was. There’s so much youth at those positions now, and it’s loaded with upside. There’s downside with it, but when you’re rolling the dice, it’s better to roll a lot of them if you only need to hit with a few.
Six Cyclones
With Xavier Hutchinson (Texans) and Anthony Johnson Jr. (Packers) drafted on the third day, Will McDonald was joined by two teammates to bring the total to seven Iowa State players drafted over the last two years, a number that matches how many were drafted over the eleven years prior. With Trevor Downing (Steelers) and M.J. Anderson (Seahawks) signing as undrafted free agents and O’Rien Vance (Giants) receiving an invitation to rookie camp, six more Cyclones are headed into the league, or at least into its periphery. The program is bearing a lot of professional fruit, and that is both a reflection of prior winning and a forecast for future winning.
The Cubs’ Bad Bullpen
FanGraphs’s Depth Charts system ranks the Cubs’ bullpen as the sixth-worst in the Major Leagues on paper by projected fWAR, though the projected FIP is twelfth-worst, much closer to the middle of the pack. This is a little discouraging, actually, because the Cubs are 15th-best in the majors in real reliever fWAR, they’re 9th-best in FIP, and that points to regression even with the bullpen the clear problem so far. The relief corps is 10th-worst in the majors in Win Probability Added, a measure of what’s happened when they’ve been on the mound, and the Cubs are four wins worse than both Pythagorean Win Probability and BaseRuns would suggest, which means they’ve been losing a jarring number of close games.
Last year, the Cubs built a masterful bullpen in the offseason, which led to a productive trade deadline. This year, it hasn’t worked out so well just yet. There’s time, but the Depth Charts piece is concerning. It signifies that this isn’t just an issue with bad luck. It signifies that it’s an issue of bad pitchers, and that while the luck should improve, the pitching should get worse.
A Clarification on the Transfer Portal
All college basketball offseason, I’ve been of the mind that the Transfer Portal “closing” May 11th means players have to get out before then, lest they be stuck in the void through the hot summer months. Turns out, that’s just when they need to get in there by, and I believe my wrong impression has shaped some of our other bloggers’ thoughts, so my sincerest apologies. There should still be a rush of activity in the next few weeks, but it’ll be much more a sifting out than I thought it would be. The flow will be cut off in one direction.
