Oilers feel flawed this year…but they still have their most crucial Stanley Cup ingredient
Welcome to part 2 of Daily Faceoff Stanley Cup Ingredients 2024-25. Quick recap: I’ve developed a formula consisting of seven common ingredients among recent Stanley Cup champions, using the previous 10 seasons as the sample to study. You can click here for a more detailed breakdown of the inspiration for the formula and how accurately it has predicted teams going deep in the playoffs.
Last week, we kicked off the series exploring the correlation between team weight and championships. Next, we assess how important elite-level scorers are to winning the Stanley Cup.
Stanley Cup Ingredient #2: TOP-10 SCORERS
We’ve seen deep teams win the Stanley Cup scoring by committee, but it’s more common for the greatest teams of all-time to have one or more marquee scorers, the players you can count on to fight through difficult matchups, tie games in the dying minutes or come up with iconic overtime winners. The dynastic franchises in particular have counted on reliable superstars. That was true of the Montreal Canadiens in the 1970s, the New York Islanders and Edmonton Oilers in the 1980s, the Pittsburgh Penguins and Detroit Red Wings in the 1990s and so on. In the salary-cap era, the Penguins, Chicago Blackhawks and Tampa Bay Lightning all carried Art Ross and Hart Trophy grade talents on their championship squads.
But is the correlation still as strong today? Let’s look at the past 10 Stanley Cup champs and how many boasted at least one of the league’s 10 best scorers at the time.
We define “Top 10 scorer” as (a) A player who finished top 10 in points during the year his team won the Stanley Cup or (b) A player who likely would have if not for injury, based on per-game scoring average, and returned in time for the playoffs. The latter are marked with asterisks.
| Season | Champion | Top-10 scorers |
| 2014-15 | Chicago | 1 (Kane*) |
| 2015-16 | Pittsburgh | 2 (Crosby, Malkin*) |
| 2016-17 | Pittsburgh | 2 (Crosby, Malkin*) |
| 2017-18 | Washington | 0 |
| 2018-19 | St. Louis | 0 |
| 2019-20 | Tampa Bay | 1 (Kucherov) |
| 2020-21 | Tampa Bay | 1 (Kucherov*) |
| 2021-22 | Colorado | 1 (MacKinnon*) |
| 2022-23 | Vegas | 0 |
| 2023-24 | Florida | 0 |
Stanley Cup correlation: Strong, but we could be seeing a shift in the trend
Six of the past 10 champs had a top-10 scorer or, in the case of the 2020-21 Lightning who parachuted Nikita Kucherov off LTIR for the playoffs, a pro-rated top-10 scorer. The Golden Knights contradicted the trend in 2022-23. The Florida Panthers did, too technically, but it was close; Sam Reinhart finished 12th in points, and Reinhart, Aleksander Barkov and Matthew Tkachuk all cracked the top 25 in points per game. That makes me skeptical that we’re seeing a major shift, but if this year’s winner doesn’t have a top-10 scorer, the discussion must change.
Let’s take a look at the current NHL scoring leaderboard, sorted by points per game and with a minimum of 40 games played:
2024-25 scoring leaders, points per game (min. 40 GP)
1. Nathan MacKinnon COL, 1.51
3. Nikita Kucherov, TB, 1.51
3. Leon Draisaitl, EDM, 1.51
4. Connor McDavid, EDM, 1.41
5. Kyle Connor, WPG, 1.25
6. Mitch Marner, TOR, 1.24
7. Jack Eichel, VGK, 1.21
8. David Pastrnak, BOS, 1.20
9. Quinn Hughes, VAN, 1.19
10. Jesper Bratt, NJ, 1.16
The top 10 includes three Stanley Cup winners, and everyone on the list except Pastrnak plays on a team occupying a playoff spot at the moment. As much as the Oilers have failed to inspire confidence during an inconsistent season, they still have two of the best scorers in the league – and McDavid and Draisaitl also rank third and fourth in NHL history behind only Wayne Gretzky and Mario Lemieux in playoff points per game (min. 50 GP). It’s a reminder that, warts and all, this team still has the star power to go on a second consecutive deep-June run thanks to its unrivalled star power.
A lot of us would predict a Stars/Panthers Cup Final, and neither club is represented among the top 10 per-game scorers, but both have multiple players averaging a point-per-game or better. Could we thus be witnessing a shift to high-end depth being the better ingredient than elite-grade scoring? The next few months will tell us.
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Previous instalments of Stanley Cup Ingredients 2025
Next up: Top-10 goalies
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POST SPONSORED BY bet365
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