Stanley Cup Winners by Seed:
Does Seeding Actually Matter?

Yes, seeding matters in the NHL. No, it doesn't matter as much as you'd think, and it matters a whole lot less than it does in the NFL. The NHL is by far the most unpredictable of the four major North American sports leagues when it comes to playoff seeding. The evidence is everywhere, and some of it is genuinely hard to believe.

Since the NHL adopted its modern conference-based playoff seeding format in 1994 - putting teams 1 through 8 in each conference - we've had 31 Stanley Cup Playoffs (one cancelled by lockout in 2005). In those 31 Cups, the top seed has won 14 times. That sounds dominant until you compare it to the NFL's #1 seed winning 53% of the time. Or until you notice that 4 of those 31 Cups went to teams seeded 5th or lower - including the only #8 seed to win a major North American sports championship in the history of pro sports.

Thirty-one playoff tournaments since conference seeding began. Here's exactly how many times each seed has hoisted the Cup.

Pull the data side by side and the picture is stark. In the Super Bowl seeding era (same 1975 start point), the NFL's #1 seed has won 53% of the time. The NHL's #1 seed? 45%. That's a significant gap. And when you look at the bottom half of the bracket, the difference becomes genuinely alarming if you're trying to bet on chalk.

In the NFL, teams seeded 5th or lower have won the Super Bowl exactly 4 times - and they've never done it as a #6 seed twice in three years. In the NHL? Seeds 5-8 have combined for 4 Stanley Cups since 1994, including back-to-back runs by the Los Angeles Kings entering as the 8th and 6th seeds. No NFL team has ever won as a #7 seed. In the NHL, even the #8 seed has won it all.

Why is hockey so different? A few reasons. The NHL is a game where a hot goalie can single-handedly carry a team for four rounds. The puck bounces funny. Any team in the field can score on any other team in the field on any given night - the skill variance between the 1 and 8 seed is genuinely smaller than in other sports. And the 82-game regular season, while long, is played at a pace where resting players for playoff positioning can actually hurt a team's timing going in.

This one isn't just a fun narrative - it's backed up by hard numbers. The Presidents' Trophy is awarded to the team with the best regular season record in the entire NHL. You'd think that would make them the heavy favorite to win it all. Instead, it has become one of the great curses in professional sports.

Since 1994, Presidents' Trophy winners have captured the Stanley Cup just 6 times in 31 seasons - a rate of 19%. That's roughly 1 in 5. Meanwhile, they've been embarrassed in the first round on multiple occasions, including some of the most dramatic first-round exits in NHL history.

The 2004 Detroit Red Wings won 109 regular season points and were the Presidents' Trophy holder. They lost in the first round to the 8th-seed Edmonton Oilers - who then went on to the Conference Finals. The 2011 Vancouver Canucks set a franchise record 117 points, swept through the West as the overwhelming favorite... and lost the Cup in Game 7 to an inferior Boston team. And then there's 2019. Tampa Bay Lightning. 128 points. The most points in NHL regular season history at that point. First round opponents: the Columbus Blue Jackets, a bubble playoff team. Final result: Columbus wins 4-0. The Lightning - the best regular season team in NHL history up to that point - got swept. In the first round. By a team that barely made the playoffs.

And it keeps happening. The 2022-23 Boston Bruins set a new NHL record with 135 regular season points - the greatest regular season in the history of the sport. Gone in Round 1. Then in 2024, they did it again - another dominant regular season, another first round exit. At this point, if you're a Bruins fan, a massive regular season record just fills you with dread.

Four different teams have won the Stanley Cup entering as the #5 seed or lower since conference seeding began. Each one is a genuinely wild story.

Every Stanley Cup Final since conference seeding began in 1994. Click any column header to sort. Search by team name or filter by seed.

The seeding era breaks into four distinct phases, and the swings are more dramatic than you'd expect. The NHL started looking like the NFL - top seeds dominant, outcomes predictable. Then things got weird. Then things got completely unhinged. Then the top seeds came roaring back.

That 2010s decade stands out as something genuinely remarkable in professional sports. In ten Stanley Cup Playoffs, the #1 seed won just once. You had two separate teams winning as the 6th and 8th seeds. You had three different franchises each winning multiple Cups (Chicago 3, LA 2, Pittsburgh 2) - but none of them were dominant enough to prevent the chaos around them. Every single one of those ten Cups featured a storyline that would have seemed impossible going into the season.

Some franchises are almost exclusively top-seeded Cup winners. Others have built their identity on winning as underdogs. The franchises with multiple Cups in the seeding era tell very different stories about how you build a dynasty in this league.

The New Jersey Devils story is the strangest one in here. Three Stanley Cups. Three completely different seeds. They never once won as the top seed or second seed - every title came as a mid-to-low seed. Martin Brodeur and Ken Daneyko just showed up in June regardless of where they'd finished in February. Meanwhile Detroit won four Cups and every single one came as the #1 seed. Same sport, same era, completely different approaches to how championships get built.

The 1994 conference seeding system is the most relevant framework for analysis, but the Stanley Cup goes back to 1893, and the NHL has been playing for it exclusively since 1927. What did the seeding picture look like before that?

When I built the Super Bowl seeding article, the data told a clear story: the NFL heavily rewards top seeds, with the #1 and #2 seeds accounting for 75% of Super Bowl wins. The NHL's number is 65%. That 10-point gap sounds small. It isn't.

What it represents is the structural reality of hockey. Football's best teams, built around elite quarterbacks, can suppress variance over four games in ways hockey teams simply cannot. One hot goalie, one puck bouncing the wrong way off a post, one 2-on-1 that goes the wrong direction - these moments happen constantly in hockey. The regular season is a rough gauge of how good you are. The playoffs are a dice roll where the die is loaded toward the better team, but only slightly.

The #1 seed is still your best bet. Fourteen wins in thirty-one seasons is more than any other individual seed by a wide margin. But the next time a wild card team sends the Presidents' Trophy winner home in the first round, don't treat it like a miracle. In the NHL, that's just the deal.