Are the 2024 NHL conference finals the strongest of the salary-cap era?

When we reach the conference finals stage of the Stanley Cup playoffs, we’re conditioned to expect at least one surprise team will still be standing. 

Last year, it was the Florida Panthers, who scraped into the playoffs on the final weekend of the regular season as a wild-card team before going on a magic carpet ride to the Final.

In 2021, the Montreal Canadiens — who finished 18th in the regular-season standings — also went on an unlikely journey to the Final. 

We’ve seen this time and again in the salary-cap era. 

The 2017 Nashville Predators.

The 2012 Los Angeles Kings.

Both the Philadelphia Flyers and Montreal Canadiens in 2010. 

A rather pedestrian regular-season team will suddenly catch fire and ride an improbable streak into the final four. They ride a hot goalie, punch above their weight and suddenly find themselves eight wins away from a Stanley Cup title. 

But not this spring. 

The clock struck midnight a long time ago for potential Cinderella teams like the Washington Capitals, New York Islanders and Predators. 

Instead, we’re left with four elite teams that many experts pegged as true Cup contenders months ago. 

In fact, if Vancouver had emerged victorious over Edmonton, it would have marked the first time in Stanley Cup playoff history that the final four was comprised of four division winners. But Edmonton certainly belongs in the conversation alongside division winners New York, Florida and Dallas. After all, the Oilers ran off a 16-game winning streak in the middle of the regular season and their roster features a pair of superstars in Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl. They’re about as elite as you can get for a non-division winner. 

So are these the strongest conference finals we’ve witnessed in the salary-cap era? 

To answer that question, Ian Mendes, Sean Gentille and Sean McIndoe have analyzed the conference finalists from each season of the salary-cap era starting in 2005-06. They’ve identified the five best conference finals and ranked them according to which final foursome was the strongest. 

Rankings: Gentille No. 4, McIndoe No. 5, Mendes No. 5

Fans in Vancouver and the Bay Area might want to look away from this one. For the bulk of the 2010s, their franchises rolled out top-shelf contenders that couldn’t quite seal the deal, and the 2011 playoffs were a prime example. This time around, the Canucks — coming off a Presidents’ Trophy win in the regular season — were a cut above the Sharks. Only one team in the cap era made a conference final with more points than Vancouver’s 117 in 2011.

In the East, a remarkably deep Bruins team needed seven games to take care of a Lightning core that was making its first postseason trip. The end result was an all-timer of a Cup Final, a seven-game war that Boston won on the road. It’d wind up as the only Cup win for both Patrice Bergeron and Zdeno Chara, and they made it count. And the star power didn’t stop with Bergeron and Chara. The conference finals featured, conservatively, 15 Hall of Famers. Count them up.

On a more general note, this postseason marked the only time all six division winners won their first-round matchups. Three years later, after a round of realignment, the “divisional pod” model was adopted. — Gentille

Rankings: McIndoe No. 3, Mendes No. 4, Gentille No. 5

To get a clear understanding of how dominant these finalists were, consider that each of them had a minimum plus-50 goal differential in the regular season: Buffalo (+66), Ottawa (+66), Detroit (+55) and Anaheim (+50). This season, 2023-24, is the only other time the conference finals in the salary-cap era have featured four teams so dominant in goal differential. This year we have Florida (+68), Dallas (+64), Edmonton (+57) and New York (+53). 

In 2006-07, Buffalo and Detroit tied for the best record in the regular season with 113 points, another rarity in which the top two teams were still alive in the conference finals. If the Red Wings had won the Western Conference crown, it would have set up a delicious Stanley Cup Final in which Dominik Hasek would have faced one of his former teams in the Sabres or Senators. Alas, it was Anaheim who beat not only Detroit but also Ottawa en route to capturing their only Stanley Cup in franchise history. 

In a strange twist, these four teams now own the four longest active playoff droughts in the NHL: Buffalo (13 years), Detroit (8 years), Ottawa (7 years) and Anaheim (6 years). — Mendes

Rankings: Mendes No. 2, McIndoe. No. 2, Gentille No. 3

The 2018 conference finals are the only one in the salary-cap era to feature four teams that finished top six in the overall regular-season standings. Winnipeg (second), Tampa (third), Vegas (fifth) and Washington (sixth) were only separated by nine points in the standings. We truly didn’t see any dramatic upsets or shocking results in the 2018 playoffs: The Presidents’ Trophy-winning Predators were bounced in the second round by the Jets in a series that required the full seven games. And with Winnipeg only three points behind Nashville in the regular-season standings, it’s hard to label that a stunning result. 

This season is best remembered for the expansion edition of the Golden Knights surprising people at every turn. After capturing the Pacific Division title, the upstart Golden Knights dispatched the Kings and Sharks in relatively short order to reach the conference finals. 

The Capitals, meanwhile, were coming off consecutive Presidents’ Trophy seasons and finally punched through to the conference finals. It remains the only season in Alex Ovechkin’s 19-year career in which his team advanced to the third round of the postseason. — Mendes

Rankings: McIndoe No. 1, Gentille No. 2, Mendes No. 3

I feel kind of weird making the case for 2024, the year that got my first-place vote. After all, I’m the history guy around here, and I’m usually quite happy to tell you why the NHL was better three decades ago than it is now.

Maybe it was — especially if you like upsets. Because man, this postseason just hasn’t had any. You could make a case that every series has gone the way it was widely expected to, and while there have been a few coin flips and maybe even mild upsets, I’m willing to bet that there are plenty of unbusted brackets out there.

And yes, that does mean this is the best final four we’ve ever had.

It’s so good that the Presidents’ Trophy winner is still alive, rested and mostly healthy, and they still may be only the fourth most likely Cup winner. We’ve got two teams back from last year’s conference finals, and two more who were there two years ago. We’ve got the best player in the world, arguably the best goaltender and an Avengers-style cast of OGWACs in Dallas. If you like to see the best teams roll over the weaklings, this year is as good as it gets.

(Also, I can’t vote for 2013 because it was a lockout year and those don’t fully count.) — McIndoe

Rankings: Gentille No. 1, Mendes No. 1, McIndoe No. 4

We’re here to judge the strongest conference finals — not the credibility of a lockout-shorted regular season. 

And in hindsight, this might be the strongest quartet of conference finalists by a healthy margin. Consider the 2013 conference finals featured the previous four Stanley Cup champions: Pittsburgh (2009), Chicago (2010), Boston (2011) and Los Angeles (2012). We may never see a final four consisting of the previous four champs again in our lifetime. 

These elite teams breezed through the shortened regular season. Chicago finished the truncated 48-game season with a ridiculous .802 points percentage. If it had maintained that pace for a full 82-game season, it would have finished with 132 points. All four teams would have averaged 115 points if they played a full regular season. 

Sprinkle in a collection of future first-ballot Hall of Famers like Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Bergeron, Chara, Patrick Kane, Jonathan Toews, Drew Doughty and Anze Kopitar and you’re looking at four rosters that were brimming with elite talent. That’s four of the best teams of the cap era, all reaching the conference finals at or near the peak of their powers. It doesn’t get much better than that. — Mendes

(Photo of Wyatt Johnston and Connor McDavid taking a faceoff: Jerome Miron / USA Today)