Could Blue Jackets’ Cinderella run end because they lack one key Stanley Cup ingredient?
Welcome to part 6 of Daily Faceoff Stanley Cup Ingredients 2025-26. To catch you up: I’ve crafted a formula consisting of seven common ingredients among recent Stanley Cup champions, using the previous 10 seasons as the sample. You can click here for a more detailed breakdown of the formula and how accurately it has predicted teams going deep in the playoffs.
Last week, we commenced the annual series by exploring the (fading!) correlation between team weight and championships. Next, we assessed how important point-per-game scorers are to capturing the Stanley Cup. Then, we examined whether elite goaltending remains as important as ever in the spring, studied the link between expected goal differential at 5-on-5 and Stanley Cups and checked the connection between an elite penalty kill and a Stanley-Cup-caliber team.
Today, we look into a crucial intangible: having that guy in the room who’s been in the deep waters and can keep teammates calm. We’re talking about Stanley Cup rings.
Stanley Cup Ingredient #6: STANLEY CUP RINGS
Experience has pretty much always been championed as a crucial component of any winning team in any pro sport. To know what it takes to win, it helps to have someone who has already done so. Here’s a breakdown of how many players on the past 10 Stanley Cup championship teams already had rings:
| Season | Champion | Stanley Cup rings |
| 2015-16 | Pittsburgh | 6 |
| 2016-17 | Pittsburgh | 18 |
| 2017-18 | Washington | 1 |
| 2018-19 | St. Louis | 1 |
| 2019-20 | Tampa Bay | 1 |
| 2020-21 | Tampa Bay | 18 |
| 2021-22 | Colorado | 2 |
| 2022-23 | Vegas | 6 |
| 2023-24 | Florida | 2 |
| 2024-25 | Florida | 15 |
Stanley Cup correlation: Absolute
The huge numbers on the 2016-17 Pittsburgh Penguins, 2017-18 Tampa Bay Lightning and 2024-25 Florida Panthers are obvious outliers coming from dynastic teams that won consecutive championships and returned many guys from the first Cup win in year 2. What matters more here: the lack of a zero in the table. Every team in the past decade had at least one guy in the room who’d lifted Lord Stanley before and could share the wisdom. It didn’t have to be a superstar player, just someone who’d been along for a start-to-finish ride on a previous championship team.
In, fact, it’s been a whopping 37 years since an NHL team won a Stanley Cup with a playoff roster consisting of no players who’d won it before. The 1988-89 Calgary Flames were the last to do it. Looking further back, they’re the only team in the past 44 seasons to accomplish that feat.
That’s a large enough sample size for us to declare the correlation significant, agreed? The logical question to ask next is: which current NHL teams are ringless?
2025-26 NHL teams without a Stanley Cup winning player
Boston Bruins
Columbus Blue Jackets
Edmonton Oilers
Philadelphia Flyers
Each of the teams lacking a single Cup winner has stayed in the playoff hunt deep into March. It’s pretty shocking to learn that no current Boston Bruin has a Cup ring, isn’t it? It shows us that the franchise has truly turned over its core, though the likes of David Pastrnak and Charlie McAvoy reached a Cup Final Game 7 in 2018-19. The Edmonton Oilers remain full of players who’ve reached consecutive Stanley Cup Finals, but the Oil no longer have a single guy with a ring on the team. (Whispers) It would be especially nice if GM Stan Bowman could procure a goaltender with a ring in the future.
It’s not catastrophic to see the Philadelphia Flyers without a Cup-winning player on their roster given they remain on the early upswing of a rebuild. But the Columbus Blue Jackets are an intriguing case. They’ve played to a dominant record since Rick Bowness took over as coach midway through the season; they have strong analytics and great goaltending; but they don’t have a single player who can stand up in the room and tell his teammates what it takes to win it all – albeit Charlie Coyle was on the Bruins team that lost Game 7 in 2018-19.
We can try to shrug off the no-Cup-winners factor as a statistical anomaly that doesn’t strongly affect the championship outcome, but then again…it’s been almost four decades since a ringless club won the Cup.
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Previous instalments of Stanley Cup Ingredients 2026
Team Weight
Point-per-game Players
Top-10 Goalie
Expected Goal Differential
Penalty-Killing Efficiency
Next up: Trade Deadline acquisitions
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