The Off-Season Rankings Disagree Most About the Team That Won the Cup

Carolina won the Stanley Cup in June, beating Vegas in six games and finishing the postseason 16-3. The Hockey News’s off-season rankings place the Hurricanes 16th. The futures board has them at +650 to +800, inside the top tier.

Half the league is ranked ahead of the champion on one list and behind it on the other. That is not an error on either side.

What each list is actually counting

An off-season ranking counts transactions. Carolina’s were few. Frederik Andersen, who went 13-2 with a 1.89 goals-against average through the championship run, signed in Edmonton. The additions were modest. On a board that scores June through August, doing almost nothing produces a middling placement no matter what happened in the spring.

A futures price counts probability of winning the next Cup. On that measure the roster that just won one is obviously near the front, minus whatever the market shaves off for repeat difficulty.

Both are internally consistent. They are just answering different questions, and the gap between them is roughly the value of continuity, which one metric treats as nothing and the other treats as almost everything.

The champion discount is real and it is applied here

Books systematically price defending champions longer than their roster warrants. Part of that is genuine: repeating is rare, and a club that played into mid-June starts the following season with fewer weeks of recovery than everyone else.

Part of it is money. Champions attract sentimental action, and a book that quotes them fairly ends up with a lopsided position. Carolina at +650 to +800 sits alongside Colorado at +600 to +750 and behind Florida at some shops, meaning the market currently prefers a team that added Brady Tkachuk and rebuilt its crease to the team that just won.

The Jordan Staal problem

There is one input neither list handles well. Jordan Staal won the Conn Smythe at 37, the oldest player ever to do so, having won Stanley Cups 17 years apart, the longest gap in league history. He scored six goals in six Final games and became the first player since 1956 to score in the first five games of a Final.

That is the sort of performance that decides a championship and cannot be projected forward. A ranking panel discounts it because it is unrepeatable. A futures market discounts it for the same reason. But it means the roster that won is being evaluated partly on a contribution nobody expects to see again, which pushes both numbers further apart rather than closer together.

The instruction that follows

Read an off-season ranking as a report on the summer, not a forecast of the season. The Hockey News is telling you Carolina did little between June and August, which is true. ESPN’s June panel put the Hurricanes first on its way-too-early board, which is also true, because it was built before the summer happened.

Montreal is fourth on ESPN’s list and roughly tenth on the odds. Minnesota is eighth on ESPN, ninth on theScore and 15th on The Hockey News. Toronto is 24th on ESPN and among the offseason winners on the AP’s list.

None of these lists is wrong. Only one of them has money behind it, and it is the one that has Carolina near the top.

Odds and market references describe the situation at the time of writing. You must meet the legal gambling age in your province or territory. See responsible gambling.