The NHL playoff prediction contest was supposed to be impossible. Things got weird

Two months ago, I launched a new prediction contest. After a few years of running the regular-season contest and watching you all fail miserably , I figured we could double our fun by adding a playoff edition.

It was a simple contest, with just one question: List as many or as few playoff teams as you'd like, in order of how many games they'd win during the postseason, from most to fewest. And I taunted you with the promise that you'd still get it wrong .

And then, a funny thing happened.

Well, two funny things, actually. The first, and most important, was that pretty much the entire playoffs went according to plan. There wasn't a single major upset, and depending on where you get your odds, the favorite won every single matchup. I'm willing to bet that there are a few perfect brackets out there, which is supposed to be just about impossible.

For years, the NHL playoffs could be counted on to deliver at least one Cinderella story. More often than not, a team that had barely snuck into the playoffs would go on a long run, sometimes to the final, discarding so-called better teams along the way. We saw it with last year's Panthers and the 2021 Canadiens and a few years of the Islanders, and the 2017 Predators, and so on down the list. They're the sort of surprises that people claim to have seen coming but never actually do, and it's what I was counting on seeing again this year. Instead, nothing. It was pretty much all chalk, all the way through.

The second thing that happened, which wasn't as surprising but still had an impact on the contest, was that we didn't get much variation in series length. In the first round, half the series went exactly five games. In Round 2, three of four were six games, and so were both the conference finals. Since I was kind enough to count a tie as a right answer, that uniformity meant that there were fewer danger zones than there could have been.

In other words, in the very first attempt at running what was supposed to be a difficult contest for you readers, all the stars aligned in your favor. No big upsets, no Cinderellas to take out everyone's entry, and even the series lengths played right into your hands. This postseason was pretty much designed in a lab to make it as easy as possible for you guys to crush this thing.

So did you? Gentle reader, you did not. Or at least, almost all of you didn't.

They don't ask how, they ask how many

Let's start with the basic numbers. The contest had 1,102 entries, and it's fair to say that the strategies were all over the map. In a contest where it was completely up to you how many teams you'd use, 108 entries went big by trying to nail all 16. Not only did none of them succeed, but none even came close. (As you already know if you follow me on X, the only one of the 16-team entries to make it out of the first round was Tanner B., who turned out to have misunderstood the rules and submitted an impossible entry. )

That lack of success isn't surprising – even in a year where the favorites dominated, trying to go 16-for-16 just introduces way too many potential points of failure. Full points for guts, but those are the only points any of you managed.

I'll admit I enjoyed the 11 entries that listed 15 teams. Presumably, they were trying to do the full field and just missed someone somewhere, but I like the idea of somebody thinking "16 is just too many, I'm not crazy." Either way, none of you came close either. Neither did Bob L., the only person to list exactly 14 teams, or James M., the only one with 13. Neither did anyone who used 12 teams (which was five of you), or 11 teams (10 entries), or 10 teams (21) or nine teams (45).

At the other end of the scale, there were 19 of you who listed just one team, which it's fair to say was going just a little bit too conservative. The advantage of listing just one team was that you were guaranteed a right answer. Or at least that's what I thought, before noticing that Samuel W. submitted an entry that included only the Ottawa Senators , who despite declaring their rebuild over for something like four straight years now, did not make the playoffs. But maybe my favorite single-team entry came from Jeffrey T., who listed the Washington Capitals . They were in the playoffs, barely, getting swept by the Rangers , which means Jeffrey managed the impressive feat of having an entry that was a) correct and b) still scored him zero points. Thanks for coming out, Jeff.

There were another 19 of you who went with just two teams, of which the majority (11) still managed to be wrong. Maybe the most impressive of those was from Scott M., who listed just the two eventual finalists, Edmonton and Florida. Unfortunately, he had them in that order, meaning he takes the contest's most suspenseful zero.

Other lowball entries included those with just three teams (27 of you), with the big jump coming on four teams (with 120). That brought us into the contest's sweet spot, with a solid majority of you settling into the middle range. The most common strategy was to go with five teams (191 of you) or six teams (245), with plenty of support for seven teams (158) and eight teams (121).

The wisdom of the crowd

Just for fun, I went through and pulled the first team listed on each entry – which is to say, the team that each entry had the most confidence in going far. This isn't quite the same as a Stanley Cup pick, mind you, and it's worth remembering that in an all-or-nothing contest like this, there's a value in intentionally going off the beaten path. Still, it gives us some useful insight into what everyone was thinking heading into the playoffs.

The team that really jumps out here is the Panthers. As they rolled their way through the playoffs, they started to feel like the obvious favorites, and as fans, we sometimes retcon that into "everyone knew they'd win all along." But they didn't get a ton of respect from our contest entries.

Speaking of respect, the Rangers were the fourth-most mentioned team, but only second in their own division, so they can still play their nobody-believed-in-us card. So can the Canucks , who narrowly finished fourth out of the four Canadian teams. I was legitimately surprised at how few of you rode with the defending champs out in Vegas. And Predators fans, consider buying a beer for Brendan S., whose five-team entry was the only one in the entire contest to list Nashville first.

OK, enough preamble. You want to know who actually got their list right.

And the winner is...

As a reminder, the way to win the contest was to have the most teams listed on a correct entry, with the tie-breaker being total wins between all teams listed.

I'd had some interesting debates in the contest's early days over what an optimal strategy would look like, with the consensus settling on something around five or six teams, and maybe even less if you strategically went with something upset heavy. I still think that's probably right in a normal year where a few underdogs surprise us, but this was not that year, so you needed to aim even higher.

Of the 1,102 entries, only 99 ended up being right, in the sense that they successfully listed all of their teams in order from most wins to the least. That's only nine percent, which isn't great but is still more than I expected. Of course, of those 99 "right" answers, 18 only listed one team, and 37 had three teams or less, meaning they were always very unlikely to win.

Then again, the long lists weren't doing any better. By the time we made it to the final, nobody whose entry included nine or more teams was still alive. (A list that thankfully included this near-disaster .)

Instead, it turned out that the magic number for this year was eight. Three entries had picked eight teams and were still alive heading into the final, and with a split of Cup-winner picks, that meant that our eventual champion would emerge from this group.

The first of the trio was Brad M., whose list was (in order) the Stars , Hurricanes , Bruins , Avalanche , Predators , Kings , Islanders and Capitals. As you might notice, there's no mention of the Panthers or Oilers on the list, meaning Brad got to the final already home and cooled out, sitting on a correct entry. It also meant that he had no chance to snag enough wins to take the tie-breaker. Sorry, Brad.

Next up was Peter P. His entry listed the Oilers, Panthers, Rangers, Canucks, Bruins, Leafs, Islanders and Capitals. Not only was he sitting with an eight-team entry, but his 54 wins heading into the final were tied for the most out of all 1,102 entries. Honestly, Peter kind of nailed the entire concept – he had both finalists, a minor underdog in the Canucks, correctly picked the Bruins to beat the Leafs but then lose in the second, and tagged on a couple of longshots who went nowhere to boost up his score. He would have been a worthy winner... if the Oilers had been able to finish the comeback. When they lost Game 7 to the Panthers, his entry went up in flames. Enjoy your zero, Peter, you dummy.

And that brings us to your winner. His entry went like this: Panthers, Stars, Rangers, Bruins, Hurricanes, Leafs, Lightning , Islanders. Eight teams, all in the correct order, joining Brad as the only ones of the 323 entries to list at least that many teams and nail them all. He didn't even need all that much help from tied series. He basically nailed the East, picked one favorite to emerge from the West, and then sweated out the Rangers' comeback attempt in the conference final. One more win from the Rangers would have doomed him, but it never came, and that meant that he was still standing to rip the crown away from Peter P. at the last moment.

Congratulations to our winner, who was (checks standings page)... Sean M.

Wait.

Yeah, I'll admit that this caught me off guard. I remembered entering the contest, like I always do, but I couldn't recall the specifics. I didn't think I'd have used eight teams, but who knows. Maybe I was really feeling it that day. Had I just defied the odds, threaded the needle, and won my own contest?

I double-checked, and... nope. My entry was terrible. It went Oilers, Hurricanes, Capitals, Rangers, Kings. In other words, I tried to get sneaky with a Capitals upset that would set me up for the low-scoring win. Not a bad strategy, honestly, but a total failure. In fact, my entry – and any others that had the Caps listed anywhere but last – would have been the very first one to be officially dead.

So congratulations to our winner, the Other Sean M. Or, as we should maybe call him, The Smarter Sean M.

To the other 98 of you who at least managed to stay alive through the playoffs, congrats to you too. It's harder than it looks, right?

And to the other 1,003 of us, myself included... there's always next year. The hockey gods were kind enough to let us play the contest debut on the easy level, but let's see what kind of madness they have saved up for us next time around.

One quick note for the contest crew: We'll get to the results for the regular season version once the smoke clears free agency, which doubles as the final day of the contest. Look for that within the next week or two.

(Top photo of the Florida Panthers' celebrations: Jim Rassol / USA Today)