The NHL Stanley Cup is the oldest existing trophy to be awarded to a professional sports franchise in North America, and often considered “the hardest trophy to win in professional sport.” Using just regular season data, we want to know, can we predict who is going to win the Stanley Cup?
We collected data from each team, as well as data from every player in over 20,000 games going back to 2005. Using this data, we made an ensemble model using logistic regression, AdaBoost, random forests, and a neural network, which were able to predict playoff data with up to 70% accuracy - above the theoretical threshold reported in the literature of 62%.