Paper 129

Is Hockey still Canada’s game? How USA teams have won every Stanley Cup since 1994

September 23, 2025: 1:00 PM - 1:30 PM

Statistics, Modeling, and Analytics (SMA), Executive Dining Room #1

Authors	Abstract
Joe Demaio, Michael Frankel, Long Doan, Aaron M	The last Canadian team to win Lord Stanley’s cup in the National Hockey League was the Montreal Canadiens in 1993. Since then, each championship has been claimed by a team geographically located in the United States. Is this streak unusual? Perhaps it is particularly unusual in light of the fact that Hockey is known as Canada’s game. Is Hockey in its modern incarnation still Canada’s game? Given the long history of the NHL should we expect such a streak to occur at some point in time? Are we too fixated on the geographic location of the teams in question? Perhaps the nationalities of the players on these Championship American teams skew heavily towards Canadian? Or perhaps to other countries? Alternatively, perhaps we are at the start of country spanning sports curse akin to the Red Sox trade of Babe Ruth. Or maybe we should just follow the money. In this paper, we examine the likelihood of such a streak, the changing landscape of nationalities and influence factors on players in the NHL.

Joe Demaio, Michael Frankel, Long Doan, Aaron M

The last Canadian team to win Lord Stanley’s cup in the National Hockey League was the Montreal Canadiens in 1993. Since then, each championship has been claimed by a team geographically located in the United States. Is this streak unusual? Perhaps it is particularly unusual in light of the fact that Hockey is known as Canada’s game. Is Hockey in its modern incarnation still Canada’s game? Given the long history of the NHL should we expect such a streak to occur at some point in time? Are we too fixated on the geographic location of the teams in question? Perhaps the nationalities of the players on these Championship American teams skew heavily towards Canadian? Or perhaps to other countries? Alternatively, perhaps we are at the start of country spanning sports curse akin to the Red Sox trade of Babe Ruth. Or maybe we should just follow the money. In this paper, we examine the likelihood of such a streak, the changing landscape of nationalities and influence factors on players in the NHL.