Playoff Implications
It is the reality of the sport. If your particular strength happens to be that you're really good offensively, and you come up against a hot goaltender and a team that is stout defensively, it might not matter that you were good on a nightly basis scoring goals. And that one particular opponent: you'll have to beat them four times.
“ ” NHL broadcaster Darren Eliot explaining the lack of success of Presidents' Trophy winners winning the Stanley Cup..The Presidents' Trophy winner is guaranteed home-ice advantage in all four rounds of the Stanley Cup playoffs, provided the team advances that far. However, it does not guarantee that success, as only seven of all the Presidents' Trophy winners have gone on to win the Stanley Cup in their respective years, leading to a popular superstition that the trophy may be cursed. In addition, six President's Trophy winners have been eliminated in the preliminary round of the playoffs, with first-round upsets being common in the NHL compared to other major professional sports leagues.
According to NHL broadcaster Darren Eliot, this lack of success is because the style of competition in the playoffs is different from the regular season: instead of playing different teams every night, the goal is to advance through four best-of-seven playoff series. The Presidents' Trophy winner may have to go through other playoff clubs who might have a hotter goaltender, a better defensive team, or other players that pose matchup problems. If the regular season champion's primary success was only outscoring others, they may be out of luck facing goaltenders that can shut them out.
Only twice in the history of the Presidents' trophy, the previous season's winner missed the playoffs the next season. The New York Rangers who won the trophy in the 1991–92 season missed the playoffs in 1992–93, the other was the Buffalo Sabres who won the trophy in the 2006–07 season missed the playoffs in 2007–08.
Read more about this topic: Presidents' Trophy
Famous quotes containing the word implications:
“Philosophical questions are not by their nature insoluble. They are, indeed, radically different from scientific questions, because they concern the implications and other interrelations of ideas, not the order of physical events; their answers are interpretations instead of factual reports, and their function is to increase not our knowledge of nature, but our understanding of what we know.”
—Susanne K. Langer (1895–1985)