How Far Are the Stars from Getting Back to the Stanley Cup Final?

At least a year, chronologically speaking

Tomorrow night, Vegas and Carolina will kick off this year’s final series of the playoffs. It’ll be Carolina’s third Cup Final in 26 years, and Vegas’s third in just nine. It’ll also be the first time this decade that a team from Florida won’t be participating, as the Panthers and Lightning were each in three of the prior six Finals.

If we were trying to extrapolate geographically, then we’d say the Dallas Stars have an excellent chance of getting back to the Final, on account of they are one of the teams that plays below the 40th parallel. The last team to win a Cup that played further north than that was the Washington Capitals, in 2018. Things were different back then (though not quite as much as you might wish them to be).

But if we assume that hockey championships are won based on things besides latitude lines, then we need to look deeper. What allows teams to get close enough to have a chance to win a Cup?

This is something I’ve been pondering for a bit now, because we all know the playoffs aren’t a linear climb where you just assume the runner-up is the favorite next year. Things are volatile in this league, and this is especially true if your team is coming out of the Central, where a club might face a Stanley Cup favorite in the first or second round.

It’s different elsewhere. Carolina had to face the 11th, 9th, and 6th-ranked teams in their first three rounds. Vegas had to face the 15th and 18th teams (in that order) before facing Colorado.

Had Dallas made it to the Final, a third-place finish in the NHL would have forced them to play the 7th and 1st-place teams before getting Vegas (13th). It’s one of many quirks of a quirky format, and it’s led to some real duds in the third round since the NHL went away from conventional 1-8 seeding a decade ago.

I say all this not to make excuses for anyone, but to point out the simple fact that it’s tough to gauge just how close a team is to a Cup Final by looking purely at how deep into the playoffs they got. In a very real sense, Dallas might’ve had an easier shot at winning a Stanley Cup this year if they’d finished with 91 points rather than 112.

Regardless, the Stars didn’t really look like a Cup contender in their brief postseason, when their five-on-five scoring dried up something’ fierce. They were missing key players and struggling to play their best hockey in all three zones, and while I’d still bet on them to have done better against Vegas in the first round than they did against Minnesota, you have to play the hand you’re dealt, and the Stars lost in six.

Things aren’t likely to be easier any time soon. So if we assume that Dallas continues to get dealt similarly tough hands in the future, just how likely is it that they’re as little as one year away from their third Cup Final since 2000?