The Presidents' Trophy Curse
How flawed thinking feeds our superstitions in ice hockey and beyond
Hockey players are a superstitious lot. The Great One, Wayne Gretzky, always put his equipment on in the same order because he thought it made a difference to his performance on the ice. He also applied baby powder to his hockey stick and never got a haircut while on the road for fear of reducing his team’s chances of winning. Sidney Crosby always calls his mother on game days. On the only three occasions when he didn’t call his mom, he suffered serious injuries. Hall of Fame goaltender Patrick Roy spoke to his goalposts and encouraged them to provide him with extra goaltending support. These are just a few examples of superstitious thinking among hockey players, but there are plenty of other examples to choose from. For example, Glenn “Mr. Goalie” Hall forced himself to vomit before games because if he didn’t, he felt as though he wasn’t doing everything he could to win. Most hockey players don’t shave during the playoffs, giving rise to the now familiar playoff beard. And several players have pre-game dressing rituals, such as donning their equipment from left-to-right or right-to-left.
But hockey superstitions are not limited to player rituals. Each year the National Hockey League (NHL) awards trophies to teams winning their conference championship finals. The Eastern Conference champions are awarded the Prince of Wales Trophy, while the Western Conference champions are awarded the Clarence S. Campbell Bowl. The ceremonies that take place at the end of a conference final championship series are usually awkward because players refuse to touch these trophies believing that doing so will somehow diminish their chances to win the most coveted prize in the game, the Stanley Cup.
One of the most pernicious superstitions in hockey is the Presidents’ Trophy Curse. The Presidents’ Trophy is awarded to the team that accumulates the most points over the regular season. Since it was established in the 1985-86 season, only eight (21%) Presidents’ Trophy winners have gone on to win the Stanley Cup. In other words, in any given season there’s nearly an 80% chance that a team awarded the Presidents’ Trophy will not go on to win the Stanley Cup. Therein lies the curse.
This year (the 2022-23 hockey season) the Boston Bruins won the Presidents’ Trophy with an historic regular season performance, winning 65 games of an 82 game season—the most games won by a hockey team during regular season play in NHL history. As a consequence of this impressive record, the Bruins were widely expected to make a deep playoff run. Some predicted they would win the Stanley Cup. But instead, the Boston Bruins were eliminated by the Florida Panthers in the first round of the playoffs. The Panthers only won 42 games during the regular season and had 43 fewer points than the Bruins at the start of their playoff series.
Hockey news writers were quick to blame the stunning loss on the Presidents’ Trophy Curse. CBS Sports called the Presidents’ Trophy winners “cursed.” The Hockey Writers called the curse a “sad reality.” TSN called winning the Presidents’ Trophy a “kiss of death.” After all, the evidence for the curse is right there in the numbers. The last team to win both the Presidents’ Trophy and the Stanley Cup was the Chicago Blackhawks during the 2012-13 regular season, which was an anomalous year anyway owing to a lockout that shortened the season. Only four teams since 2000 have gone on to win the Stanley Cup after winning the Presidents’ Trophy.
Sports fans will no doubt recall similar curses, such as the famous curse of the Sports Illustrated cover feature. The popular sports magazine often features on their cover athletes and teams that have recently performed exceptionally well in a wide range of sports. But, like the Presidents’ Trophy Curse, being featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated is its own kiss of death for athletes and their teams. For example, in 1957 the University of Oklahoma football team was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated for their incredible 47 game winning streak. They lost their very next game after the cover feature. Baseball player Daniel Murphy was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated in November 2015 for his record-breaking post-season batting record, leading the New York Mets to the World Series. But after his cover feature, Murphy’s batting performance tanked and the Mets lost the World Series to the Kansas City Royals in five games. There are many other examples.
For the superstitiously minded, these anecdotes make for good, satisfying stories. But they all reflect a common error in thinking. When a team or an individual performs exceptionally well, we like to think that they somehow hit upon just the right combination of diet, exercise, sleep, and practice that led to their exceptional performance. We expect that as long as they keep on doing what they’re doing, their performance will continue to be exceptional. Most often, exceptional performance is just that—exceptional; outside of the normal range, unusual, not typical. The odds of performing exceptionally well (or poorly, for that matter) at something, not just sports, are very low. The odds of performing exceptionally well two or more times in a row are much, much lower, often close to zero. Therefore, the expectation after any exceptional performance should not be yet another exceptional performance, but rather a performance that better reflects a more usual performance, reflected in the average or mean for that particular performer (team or athlete in our example).
Our expectation for continued exceptional performance based on the occurrence of a single exceptional performance is a type of flawed thinking that fails to acknowledge a well known statistical phenomenon known as regression to the mean. Regression to the mean implies that after any exceptional performance, the following performance will tend towards (regress) the average (mean) or more usual performance. The more exceptional the performance, the greater the regression tends to be towards the mean. That’s why when the Boston Bruins have an historic regular season performance, when all the points are set to zero before the first puck drop of the playoffs, the chances of them performing as well are vanishingly small.
This kind of flawed thinking impairs our judgement and causes us to make up convincing narratives, such as curses and other superstitions, to help explain a failure to maintain exceptional performance. In his excellent book, Thinking Fast and Slow1, cognitive psychologist and Nobel laureate, Daniel Kahneman, described two types of thinking which he coined System 1 and System 2. System 1 thinking is intuitive thought. It’s fast thinking. It’s best characterized as one’s tendency to jump to a conclusion, to make up a convincing and coherent narrative to explain something that’s difficult to understand. It’s lazy and not energetically demanding. It’s automatic and it often leads one to draw incorrect conclusions. By contrast, System 2 thinking is the opposite of System 1. It is best characterized as deep, analytical thought. It’s not automatic. It has to be actively engaged and it’s energetically demanding. Usually, when System 2 is called upon to consider a question that’s difficult to understand, it usually arrives at the correct answer, albeit slowly.
Those who attribute the Boston Bruins’ loss in the first round of the playoffs are guilty of failing to recognize their regression to the mean. This is a consequence of only engaging System 1 cognition, which produces the coherent and satisfying narrative of a curse that prevented them from advancing to the second round, instead of the far more likely explanation that their playoff performance is more likely to reflect their usual level of play rather than their exceptional performance in the regular season.
Of course, flawed thinking, such as failing to recognize regression to the mean, affects many other aspects of our lives than just predicting sports outcomes. For example, people tend to invest in high-yield mutual funds on the assumption that they’ll continue to produce a high yield. But it’s far more likely that in the long run, high-yield mutual funds will perform about as well as lower-yield funds owing to regression to the mean. Health disorders tend to correct themselves without any kind of intervention owing to the body’s ability to heal. However, most people attribute their improved health on the medical intervention rather than the natural homeostatic systems of their own bodies. When an employee’s productivity falls after receiving recognition for their exceptional performance, office managers will mistakenly attribute it to the employee resting on their laurels instead of correctly attributing it to regression of the mean.
There are exceptions to every rule. For example, since the inception of the Presidents’ Trophy in the 1985-86 season, eight trophy winning teams went on to win the Stanley Cup. Michael Jordan was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated 34 times without any appreciable drop in his performance on the basketball court. Some high-yield mutual funds deliver high-yields over the long run. And importantly, sometimes medical interventions are absolutely necessary to correct health problems. Nevertheless, it’s important to be aware of our own flawed thinking and those of others so we can defend against it, especially in this age of misinformation.
Now, if you’ll excuse me I have a hockey game to watch. I will be cheering on the Toronto Maple Leafs who have been performing exceptionally poorly during the second round of this year’s playoff season, having lost the first three games of the best-of-seven series with the very same Florida Panthers that took out the Boston Bruins in the first round. I’m counting on their regression to the mean to come back and win the series, so they have a fighting chance to lose against the Edmonton Oilers in the all-Canadian Stanley Cup final.
I never said that I was immune to flawed thinking . . .
Kahneman, D. 2011. Thinking Fast and Slow. Random House. New York, NY.