Cuphead Deals With The Devils (Among Others)

With the All-Star break in hockey, I thought it would be a good time to look at a concept I'd wondered about. The history of hockey is kind of weird because there were so few teams for so long: We're told that certain teams are really great because of all the Stanley Cups they won, but many of those were in the original-six era, when you just had to beat five other teams. You would actually have better odds of winning a cup then, than you do of winning a division now.

So I devised a game to test the accumulated achievement of each franchise. Instead of counting how many cups each team has won, I counted how many teams they defeated to win their cups. In other words, each cup is worth points; specifically, one point for every other team in the league at the time. So a cup win in the original-six era is worth 5 points, while last year's win for Vegas was worth 31 points.

Here are the results (not counting non-NHL teams that won in the early years):

Rank	Team	Total Teams Defeated
1	Montreal Canadiens	231
2	Detroit Red Wings	147
3	Pittsburgh Penguins	128
4	Chicago Blackhawks	107
5	Edmonton Oilers	100
6	Tampa Bay Lightning	89
7	Colorado Avalanche	85
8	New Jersey Devils	81
9	New York Islanders	80
10	Boston Bruins	74
11	Toronto Maple Leafs	63
12	Los Angeles Kings	58
13	New York Rangers	48
14	Philadelphia Flyers	32
15	Vegas Golden Knights	31
16	St. Louis Blues	30
16	Washington Capitals	30
18	Anaheim Ducks	29
18	Carolina Hurricanes	29
20	Dallas Stars	26
21	Calgary Flames	20
23	Ottawa Senators (original)	14
24	Montreal Maroons	13

So what does this prove?

• The Habs still come out on top. While many of their wins were for just five, the sheer number of them, combined with their many cups in the seventies, gave them an easy win.
• The big beneficiaries were teams that won multiple cups post-1980 for twenty-odd points each. Pittsburgh and Edmonton were vaulted past most of the original-six teams, while Chicago has esteem they never used to have. That fits with how someone my age sees the league: the prestige of those franchises outweighs the prestige given to original-six teams merely for being old.
• Unsurprisingly, the big losers were the Maple Leafs. Only two of their cups scored more than five points, and they were from before the original-six era. Thus, they fell behind Tampa, Colorado, and New Jersey. Having said that, a single win now would push them past all those teams.
• The Rangers did better than you might expect. Yes, they've only won once in the past eighty years, but their three cups in the early years were before original-six, when there were more teams.