Which team best fits the profile of the last 19 Stanley Cup winners?

I've been thinking a lot lately about which team is the best in the NHL this season. It's not an easy question to answer.

Someone might say, "The Washington Capitals," and it's like… I dunno, man. They're scoring about 60 percent of the goals right now and playing good hockey, but I'm not sure they're doing anything especially elite apart from "scoring on 13 percent of the shots they take." Which, hey, you gotta do it, but leading the league in shooting percentage and ranking second in save percentage doesn’t seem sustainable long term for a team with this specific makeup. Even if those results do collapse tomorrow, they should still be a good team. I just don't know about "best," unless the things they do well really do result in a 104 PDO.

Okay, what about "The Winnipeg Jets?" Did you know they're getting out-attempted in all situations? It's true. They're okay, but they mostly just have the best player in the league this season at the most important position in the sport, and we’ve seen how that formula works for this franchise once the playoffs roll around.

You can go on like this for a while, but the practical upshot is that, unlike in recent seasons, you can pretty easily poke holes in the idea that anyone is a serious Stanley Cup favourite in the way that the Florida Panthers were last season. Florida had elite players at every position except goalie (where they kind of caught lightning in a bottle), relatively few major injuries to contend with, and played exceptional hockey for the full 82 games, posting goal differentials and underlying numbers that were at or near the top of the board across the league.

With that in mind, I wondered whether it might be productive to put together the statistical profiles for every Cup winner of the salary cap era — we're up to 19 now — and see which teams kinda-sorta fit the profile across a ton of statistical categories. Broadly speaking, Cup winners tend to score about 55 percent of the goals in all their games and put up 53-plus percent in categories like shot attempts, unblocked attempts, shots on goal, and expected goals. They score almost three goals per hour and allow just under 2.6. They shoot about 9.5 percent and get save percentages just north of .910; that means their PDO checks in just over 100.8, which makes sense insofar as you'd expect Cup winners to be able to score or prevent goals above the league average.

So the question is, which teams look the most like Cup winners these days? Across nearly two dozen statistical categories, a picture starts to develop. Washington falls short on total and unblocked shot attempts. The Toronto Maple Leafs, Winnipeg Jets, Vegas Golden Knights, and Tampa Bay Lightning don’t fit the profile in basically every "advanced" stat. Florida and the Colorado Avalanche don’t have the goal differential (though in Colorado’s case, you can see how they might get there by season’s end now that they've got the goalie situation mostly sorted out). The Minnesota Wild aren’t really at the level we’re looking for across the board either, but maybe if you squint, you can call it a result of injuries and not necessarily a roster issue.

It's worth noting that only two Cup winners were outshot across their regular-season campaigns. The 2008-09 Pittsburgh Penguins and 2017-18 Washington Capitals combined to have just one underlying number north of 50 percent (Pittsburgh’s expected goals-for percentage, at just under 51 percent), and not surprisingly, they were also the two worst Cup winners in terms of goals-for percentage. Basically, history tells us that if you don’t score at least 52 percent of the goals in the regular season, you aren’t going to win the Cup. And apart from that Capitals team’s expected goals-for percentage (47 percent), you gotta be north of 50 in that category and greatly outrun that expected-goals number.

All of this analysis also doesn’t preclude a strong second-half run, like what we saw with the 2018-19 St. Louis Blues and the 2011-12 Los Angeles Kings, but again, we’re talking about what’s projectable right now. If you're sitting on sub-50 underlying numbers and hoping everything goes right for you in the second half, that’s kind of definitionally hoping for a miracle.

In all, the number of teams this season that score 55 percent of the goals and post 53 percent of the underlyings is quite small: Dallas, Edmonton, Los Angeles, Carolina, and New Jersey. I would say those are probably, on some level, your Cup favorites right now, just because it's easiest to project that those teams will continue to play at or near this level. Of course, any club can catch a few good or bounces between now and late June to alter the landscape, sometimes dramatically (as with the Dougie Hamilton injury last season). And because no team is perfect, you can make arguments for or against any of them.

If you take a look at where every underlying number ranks for them in the league — all their (blank)-for percentages, their (blank)- for and -against per hour, their (blank) difference per hour, their shooting and save percentages, etc. — those are the top five teams in the league, and apart from Dallas, which has the third-highest save percentage in the league, none of them have high percentages. If anything, most of them are coming in pretty low, which is weird. How do the Oilers have the 10th-lowest shooting percentage in the league this year?

But in a lot of ways, the profiles track, because the other thing almost every Cup winner in the cap era has is "at least three elite players at their positions." That's how you outperform your expected-goals numbers, right? Elite goaltending gets you there, obviously. A great power play fueled by reliably great forwards gets you there. It's harder if one of your best players is a defenseman who can't also put up 50-plus points or so consistently, but not impossible. Does LA have a truly elite player at any position at this point? Do Carolina, New Jersey, or Edmonton have the goaltending? The thing is, the one stat that feels like it's looming largest these days is save percentage, just because that number is down the past few years for the league as a whole, but pointedly not for championship teams. The last three Cup winners all had team save percentages right around the 19-year average (.913) and the two before that were COVID Cups with extremely skewed results.

So of the five teams that feel like they're in that elite tier in terms of projectability, none of them seem to have the goaltending right now. But Jake Oettinger feels like the closest thing to a good bet for, if not elite numbers, then at least really good ones. Add in the fact that Jason Robertson is finally going at a high level, the talent especially in the top half of the lineup, and multiple young defensemen have pretty high ceilings, and it's easy to see a world where things converge for Dallas at the right time and they win this. The Stars' average rank across all the statistical categories mentioned above 5.61, tied for second in the league with Edmonton, and just behind Carolina (5.52). New Jersey (6.74) and LA (7.74) round out the top five.

In fact, there are only stats the Stars aren't top-10. The first is goals per 60 — they're 11th — and that's because the second is shooting percentage — they're 22nd. If they get a little more shooting luck in the second half of the season, they could go on a big ol' run.

Maybe, just maybe, all the way to a Stanley Cup.