So I keep hearing about the "curse of the President's trophy" and how "only" 30% of it's winners have won the Stanley Cup and it got me thinking, which is always dangerous.

I started thinking "wait, there are 16 teams in the playoffs each year.  That means, in theory, that each of those teams has a 6.25% chance of winning the cup" (looking strictly at math, I think we all recognize top seeds have a better chance in reality because they are the better teams).  So a 30% win rate seemed pretty good to me but I wanted to find out how good it really was.

My methodology was to go back and seed all playoff teams based strictly on points and then find the seeding of every winner of the Cup since the 85-86 season when the President's trophy was first awarded   I realize this is slightly flawed since division winners get a higher seed even if they have less points than other teams that qualified but I didn't have time to accurately research that information so I cheated, deal with it.  (I'll try to actually do that on 4/14 if I have the time)

Below you will find the number of times each "seed" won the Cup and the winning % of that "seed".  I also have this years playoff teams listed for informational purposes.  Basically what I found is you don't want to have a double digit seeding.  And now that I'm done playing Captain Obvious here is the real analysis

• there is no "curse" for the President's trophy.
• the top 4 seeds have won an amazing 69.57% of the time
  
• it's good to be #1
• lowest seed to ever win was #9, the Devils in 94-95
• I like where we are at.

On to the numbers

And here is the list of winners and all their "seed"

Again I haven't seen anything out there like this but if you know of something please let me know.