Winning end-of-season awards is normally nice, but when it comes to the NHL, there’s one honor nobody wants to see: The Presidents’ Trophy. Awarded to the team with the best record in the regular season, it’s become a death knell for hopes of winning the Stanley Cup, with such a scary history that it’s referred to as a “curse.”
That curse claimed another victim on Tuesday night, with the Colorado Avalanche being swept 4-0 by the Vegas Golden Knights in the Western Conference Finals, ensuring they’ll need to wait another year to get a shot at hoisting Lord Stanley’s Cup. The loss by Colorado means it’s now been 13 years since a team that won the Presidents’ Trophy went on to win the Stanley Cup, while teams that won the trophy are now 8-and-32 when it comes to winning the Stanley Cup Finals.
What happened to the Colorado Avalanche?
Posting a record of 55-16-11 in the regular season and amassing 121 points, the Avs weren’t just the best regular season team in 2025-26 by a large margin, but one of the best teams of all time. They ranked 11th all-time in most points scored by a team, and 4th in the last 20 years, with their 16 regulation time losses ranking 5th-fewest in the last 40 years.
In short: This was a dominant, brilliant team. Fueled by three standout star players in Nathan McKinnon, Martin Necas, and Cale Makar, they had every trapping of going on to easily win the cup, so long as they could make it out of a brutal Central Division road that contained the Dallas Stars and Minnesota Wild. They managed to get out of their division, but were absolutely overwhelmed when they met the Golden Knights, a team that was vastly inferior on paper.
The issue was that a lingering injury to Makar reared its head at the worst time, while both McKinnon and Necas played far below their regular-season form. This allowed a sneaky Vegas team coached by John Tortarella to overwhelm them physically and win it all.
While the justifications for the loss might seem simple, Colorado’s collapse never should have happened.
Is the Presidents Trophy disparity unusual in sports?
Yes. Across the broader sports landscape, it is very bizarre to have the best team in the regular season flame out in the postseason the way it happens in the NHL. If we go back 20 years here are the overall records of the best team going on to win in the NFL, NBA, MLB, and NHL.
- NFL: 7-and-13
- NBA: 7-and-13
- MLB: 7-and-13
- NHL: 2-and-18
Statistically, we see the best regular-season team in every sport lose more often than they win, but it’s particularly pronounced in hockey. The other big four leagues see their best regular season team win 35-percent of the time, in the NHL it’s only 10-percent. There is no doube that when it comes to the NHL there’s something fundamentally different between the regular and postseason.
What is the difference between regular and postseason play?
The biggest thing in hockey is that the regular season is about depth, consistency, and top-end ability, with little strategic management. Essentially teams are going out there are trying to assert their will on opponents using simply their own offensive and defensive tendencies, without much attention to countering what the opponent is doing. That’s simply the nature of an 82-game schedule where you’re facing multiple opponents throughout the week.
When the playoffs roll around, everything changes. Not only do the stakes mean the mettle of a team is tested, but playing best-of-seven means there’s ample time to learn from the first game or two, adapt, and try to counter for the rest of the series. This has been typified by the Eastern Conference Finals, which saw Montreal dominate to a 6-2 win over Carolina in the opener, only for the Hurricanes to adjust. They are now up 2-1 in the series, and the Canadiens are struggling to shoot the puck.
In addition to these factors, we see teams use a two-goaltender rotation during the regular season to manage the workload of netminders, where in the playoffs teams will only rely on their top guy, unless unusual circumstances arise. This plays a large role, too, with opposing teams learning goalie tendencies, capitalizing on them, and putting coaches in awkward situations where they either need to roll with a struggling goalie if they fail in the playoffs, or make a switch to a player who might not be ready.
All these variables mean that it’s routine to see a team have elite regular-season performances and then falter in the postseason, and vice-versa (hi there, Vegas).
So, the Presidents’ Trophy curse is real?
Well, not quite. While the winner of the Presidents’ Cup has only won eight times in 40 attempts, they’ve also gone on to lose to the eventual Stanley Cup Champion in another 14 seasons. That means that over 50 percent of the time the team who won the regular season has either been the best team in the league, or gone on to lose to the best team in the league.
In addition, there’s no other playoff seed that has won more than the Presidents’ Trophy winner, so this is all more a sign of the parity in the NHL and the difficulty of playoff hockey, rather than a specific curse related to the award. Still, it’s wild that we’ve gone so long without having the best regular season team also hoist the cup at the end.
