The Improbability Of Canada's Stanley Cup Drought

Forbes

20-06-2025

The Florida Panthers defeated the Edmonton Oilers for the second straight year in a row to capture the Stanley Cup on June 17. This marks the sixth Stanley Cup final in a row featuring a hockey team from the Sunshine State. It has been an incredible stretch of hockey at the highest levels for both the Florida Panthers and the Tampa Bay Lightning.
On the other side of the emotional spectrum, Canadians are once again left waiting to bring the Cup back to the birthplace of ice hockey. There was a sense that this might finally be the year Canada broke its long, frustrating drought. Hopes were high going into this year's Stanley Cup Playoffs, as five of seven Canadian NHL teams qualified for the postseason. The last time a Canadian team won the cup was in 1993 when the Montreal Canadiens defeated the Los Angeles Kings.
That was also the debut season for the Tampa Bay Lightning and came just one year before the Florida Panthers joined the league. In the time since, teams from Florida have hoisted the Cup five times.
For Canadian hockey fans, this is not just another painful moment, it is a gut punch laced with irony. The notion that teams from sun-soaked Florida could be celebrating year after year while Canada remains empty-handed feels almost cruel. And yet, as improbable as it seems, this run of southern dominance is very real. This is where probability theory can offer a new perspective. What are the odds that Canada could go over three decades without a Stanley Cup? How likely is it that two relatively young franchises from a non-traditional hockey market could have this much success? And perhaps most importantly: when, statistically speaking, might Canadian fans finally get to celebrate again?
To put a number to Canada's hockey heartbreak, I built a Bayesian model. This is a statistical approach that is designed to capture long-term trends while staying grounded in a fair and interpretable framework. At its core, a Bayesian approach is a way of updating a belief state in light of new evidence. It starts with a prior belief which is an initial estimate of how likely something is to happen. As new data comes in, that belief is updated to form a posterior belief, which becomes a more refined, data-informed estimate.
The model begins with a neutral prior belief known as a Beta(1, 1) distribution, which assumes no preconceived belief about whether Canadian teams are more or less likely to win the Stanley Cup in a given season. This assumption that replicates the extreme uncertainty inherent in sports.
From there, each season after the NHL-WHL merger becomes a data point. The model looks at whether a Canadian team won the Stanley Cup. If one of them did, that year adds a 'success' to the tally. If not, it's another 'miss.' With each new season, the model refines its estimate of how likely it is that a Canadian team will win in a given year.
The beauty of the Bayesian approach is that it balances the weight of history with the possibility of change. What emerges is a dynamic, evolving probability. It is a quantifiable value that captures just how long the Cup has stayed away from Canada, and how likely it is to come home anytime soon.
Between 1980 and 1993, Canadian teams were a dominant force in the NHL, capturing eight Stanley Cups in just 14 seasons. The Edmonton Oilers led the charge with five titles during their dynasty years, followed by the Montreal Canadiens with two, and the Calgary Flames with one. At the time, it felt like the Cup belonged to Canada.
Heading into the 1993–1994 season and fresh off the Canadiens' most recent Cup win, the Bayesian model, would have estimated about a 60% chance that a team from Canada would win the Cup that year. But as the seasons passed and the Cup stayed south of the border, that probability began to fall. Over time, it gradually leveled off around 20%, aligning closely with what you would expect if every NHL team had an equal shot in a 32-team league.
Using this model, the probability that no Canadian team has won a Stanley Cup since 1993 is 0.0000037 or roughly 1 in 300,000. That is roughly the same odds as flipping a fair coin and getting heads 18 times in a row. In a sport defined by randomness and parity, this kind of losing streak is not just heartbreaking. It is statistically absurd.
The same Bayesian model that tracks Canada's teams' annual probability to win the Stanley Cup can be used to predict when a Canadian NHL team will win again. In simple terms, the expected wait time is just the inverse of the annual win probability.
After updating the model following the 2025 Stanley Cup Final, the estimated probability that a Canadian team wins in any given season is 19%. Flip that number, and the math tells us something hopeful, if not immediate: on average, we can expect a Canadian team to bring home the Cup in about 5.2 years. Of course, this is just an average. Canada could win as soon as next season, or the drought could drag on longer.
Canada's Stanley Cup drought is more than just a sporting oddity. It is a statistical anomaly that defies expectation. For a country that lives and breathes hockey, the fact that no Canadian team has lifted the Cup since 1993 feels more like a cosmic joke than a cold streak. The numbers suggest that Canada's fortunes will eventually turn. And when a Canadian captain finally hoists the Cup again, it will not just be a victory for one team. Rather, it will feel like the end of a national exile, long overdue and deeply earned.