Odds of Canada not winning Stanley Cup for 32 years are 3 in 10,000, according to one calculation

The math says it almost shouldn’t happen. A Canadian team has not won the Stanley Cup in 32 years, and the odds of a drought that long are about three in 10,000.

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That figure comes from Doug Stotz, a retired financial services executive outside Boston who has been running the numbers on Canada’s losing streak for at least a decade.

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The Stanley Cup Final opens Tuesday in Carolina, with the Hurricanes hosting the Vegas Golden Knights. Both teams are American. The last Canadian team to win was the Montreal Canadiens in 1993. The closest a Canadian team came this year was the Canadiens again, who lost the Eastern Conference final to Carolina.

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Stotz built the estimate on a simple idea. Each season, he took the share of teams in the league that were not Canadian, then multiplied those odds across every year since 1994.

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“This year there are 32 teams that started the season. Seven of them were from Canada,” Stotz said. “So, if you knew nothing about how good each team was, a Canadian team has a 22 per cent chance of winning the Stanley Cup. And so, there’s a 78 per cent chance that a team from the States would win.”

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The league has grown over that stretch, from 26 teams in 1994 to 32 today, while the number of Canadian teams held between six and eight. As the league expanded, the annual odds against a Canadian winner climbed from about 69 per cent to 78 per cent.

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Run that out over 32 years and the chance of no Canadian winner the whole time lands at 0.03 per cent.

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Stotz is the first to say the number is rough.

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“All models are flawed, but some are useful,” he said.

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He called it a quick and dirty estimate. A more refined version would weigh each team’s real chances and count only the teams that made the playoffs, since a team cannot win the cup without getting there first. Stotz said a sharper model would still land in the range of a one-in-a-thousand event (0.1 per cent).

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Jeffrey Rosenthal, a statistics professor at the University of Toronto, said the simple model overstates how unlikely the drought is, because it treats every season as a fresh, independent event.

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“Many players and coaches stay on the same team from one year to the next, so most teams’ skill levels are somewhat similar to the previous year,” Rosenthal said in an email. “So if they performed badly the previous year, they are more likely to do so again.”

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Teams are not equal to begin with, he said, and the gap is not just luck.

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“Some teams are better than others, and this is not just due to random chance, but also to many structural economic and historical factors, including fan base, dollar exchange rate, reputation,” Rosenthal said.

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He said the low odds point to a conclusion the headline number misses.

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“The fact that it would be so unlikely for no Canadian team to win in 32 years if it were just random actually demonstrates that it is not just random,” Rosenthal said.

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Stotz is a lifelong Boston Bruins fan. He said he started the calculation while working at the Bank of Montreal in Canada, and still sends the chart tracking how the odds have changed since 1994 to his Canadian friends.

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Stotz said hockey lends itself to long droughts more than most sports.

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“Hockey is a sport with the greatest chance that the non-favoured team wins,” he said.

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Low-scoring games and frequent overtimes mean upsets are common, he said, which is part of why a streak this long can build.

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Whether the drought is bad luck or something more, Stotz lands on the simpler answer.

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“That’s just random weirdness,” he said, “or a statistical anomaly.”