Presidents’ Trophy Cursed Teams: The Worst Losses for the NHL’s No. 1 Seeds

I’m not usually one to buy into curses in sports. But, the one curse that is 100% certifiably true is the NHL’s Presidents’ Trophy Curse. 

For the unaware, there’s a phenomenon in professional hockey where the team that wins the Presidents’ Trophy, awarded each year to the team with the most regular-season wins, usually doesn’t win the Stanley Cup. 

Furthermore, many teams have been completely exposed in franchise-altering, embarrassing fashions in the first round.

With another potential first-round upset on the horizon, with this year’s trophy winner, the Winnipeg Jets, it’s worth revisiting the three worst beats for the Presidents’ Trophy teams.

1. 2022-23 Boston Bruins

The most recent bad beat for a Presidents’ Trophy team just so happens to be one of the worst playoff collapses in sports history. 

The 2023 Boston Bruins amassed the most ever regular season wins and points, in addition to five other league records, including most ever road wins in a season and longest home-winning streak to start a season. 

Record books probably don’t go far enough to show what the Bruins managed to do that year, with a core that had been around since their last Stanley Cup win a decade earlier. 

Going into the 2023 playoffs, Boston was a cautious favorite to win the Stanley Cup.

Matched up against the Florida Panthers in the first round, a team that had won the Presidents’ Trophy the year prior and was eliminated in the second round, the Bruins jumped out to a 3-1 series lead. 

They then lost in overtime at home in a closeout Game 5 and were defeated 7-5 in Game 6 in Florida. In Game 7, the Bruins had a 3-2 lead going into the game’s final minute, surrendered a tying goal while the Panthers’ goalie had been pulled, and then gave up an OT winner. 

All of those facts, the winningest season in NHL history, a 3-1 series lead, and a 3-2 lead in the final minute of Game 7, make this the worst ever loss for a Presidents’ Trophy team. It’s hard to imagine a perfect storm of choking on that level ever happening again. 

Also, with their loss in 2023, the Bruins kept the streak going for all four major American professional sports, where the team that won the most regular-season games has never won the championship. 

2. 2018-19 Tampa Bay Lightning

Boston did the Tampa Bay Lightning a real solid because this loss doesn’t get brought up anymore as Exhibit A for Presidents’ Trophy Curses. But at the time, it was one of the biggest playoff embarrassments ever in professional sports. 

In 2019, Tampa tied the previous record of 62 regular-season wins held by the 1996 Detroit Red Wings — a team that, also, didn’t win the championship. 

The Lightning boasted a Hart winner in Nikita Kucherov and a Vezina Trophy winner in Andrei Vasilevsky. Sounds like a Stanley Cup winning formula, right? The league’s best player and its best goalie. 

Enter the Columbus Blue Jackets.

Columbus had a fairly successful 47-win season after loading up at the trade deadline. They landed the East’s final playoff spot that year by scoring on the New York Rangers in the final minute of a shootout. 

The Blue Jackets would sweep the record-tying Tampa in pretty overwhelming fashion. The closest game was a 4-3 victory in Game 1, but other than that, Columbus won every other game by multiple goals, putting up a touchdown in Game 4. 

The Lightning became the first Presidents’ Trophy winner to get swept in the first round. 

And, to add a little postscript to this story, while Tampa did win back-to-back Stanley Cups in the following seasons, they both came during Covid-19-altered seasons. In 2020, they won in an empty arena in Edmonton, and in 2021, they won in a shortened season. 

3. 1990-91 Chicago Blackhawks

The ‘91 Blackhawks are the originators of the first-round Presidents’ Trophy loss. 

They were only the sixth team awarded the Trophy after its inception in the 1985-86 season and the first to lose in Round 1.

This season was the best of the relatively short-lived Chris Chelios era and has been called the best Blackhawks team never to win the Stanley Cup. 

In addition to Chelios, the Blackhawks had Hall of Fame goalie Ed Belfour, who won both the Vezina and Calder Trophies that season. 

Chicago lost in six games in the opening round to the Minnesota North Stars — the spiritual successor to the Minnesota Wild and the literal successor to the Dallas Stars. Unlike the first two series losses on this list, Minnesota was not a sneaky good regular-season team. Instead, they were straight up bad. 

The North Stars had a below .500 record, 27-39-14, and, according to Hockey Reference, had a -0.10 score on their simple rating system, in contrast to the Blackhawks’ 0.85 simple rating. 

Minnesota won Game 1 in overtime, then lost the next two, before closing out the series with three straight wins, including a 6-0 Game 5 shutout victory in Chicago Stadium.