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Can the QMJHL make it a fourth straight Memorial Cup in London 2014?

Cam Charron

In 2011, the Saint John Sea Dogs won the Memorial Cup in Mississauga against the host Mississauga-St. Michael's Majors.

In 2012, the host Shawinigan Cataractes won the Memorial Cup against the London Knights in a building that almost assuredly had more people in it than the fire department allowed.

In 2013, the Halifax Mooseheads won the Memorial Cup against the Portland Winterhawks, decimating them in two games with a combined score of 13-8 (plus a dominant 9-2 win over the Ontario Hockey League champion Knights).

We're entering the 2013-2014 season, and the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League is on a streak of three consecutive Memorial Cup Championships. It's the first time that a league has won three consecutive years since the Western Hockey League held the Cup from 1987-1989, and this is the first time the Cup has been awarded to three different teams from the same league in consecutive years since the tournament format debuted in 1972. They're riding pretty high right now, considering that under the current Memorial Cup format, used since 1983, the Q has generally been the ugly stepsister of the three major junior leagues, accounting for just seven of the 31 Cups awarded.

So what are the odds of the QMJHL stretching it to a fourth consecutive year?

Probably about 25%. There will be four teams competing in London in 2014, and the QMJHL will account for one of them. In such a short tournament, it's unlikely that the most talented team will win year after year after year. The 2012 tournament in Shawinigan proved that: despite dominant franchises stacked with future NHLers, neither the Knights nor the Edmonton Oil Kings nor the Saint John Sea Dogs could knock off the host team that lost in the second round of the QMJHL playoffs. The Cataractes won three consecutive elimination games, and one of them came in overtime, when a single bounce or uncharacteristically bad play could have cost them the tournament.

The QMJHL did not win a Memorial Cup between 1982 and 1996, a streak of 14 years broken by the Granby Predateurs playing in Peterborough. The wholly random odds of a league going 14 years without a Cup despite hosting four times? About 0.31% , or once out of every 323 years. Part of that slump is what helped establish the QMJHL's reputation as the weakling of the three leagues. Whether the "three in three" streak the Q is on is due to the superiority of the league and the players it develops or due to random chance, it's clear that the league itself is at least on equal footing with its WHL or OHL rivals. There is more parity in each of the other two leagues, but at the top, the Mooseheads of 2013 and Sea Dogs of 2011 showed they could skate with the best the OHL and WHL had to offer in those rinks.

The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky devoted their life's work to determining how people think. Human perception of things that occur in structures that are random, such as sports games, eventually lead to us making inferences about why randomness worked in a certain way. From Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow:

The trader-philosopher-statistician Nassim Taleb, could also be considered a psychologist. In The Black Swan, Taleb introduced the notion of a narrative fallacy to describe how flawed stories of the past shape our views of the world and our expectations for the future. Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative. Taleb suggests that we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true.

I think that's applicable to the current QMJHL streak. By the time the 2014 Memorial Cup rolls around, there will be columns asking whether the champion of the QMJHL, a team that likely will have steamrolled its way through three playoff rounds, can make it a fourth straight. The Edmonton Sun's Terry Jones in 2012 wrote about the WHL slump at the Cup, but I think that there's a distinct possibility that the WHL's success at the annual tournament in the past could be at least somewhat related to luck. Ultimately, the WHL team in a QMJHL rink will have a 25% chance, same as the Q, while the OHL champion (or runner-up if the Knights come up with their own three-peat) plus the host squad make it a half chance the OHL skates away with the Cup again. If the tournament were longer, the probabilities would shift in favour of the stronger teams, but the single-elimination knockout round means that pretty much anything can happen, especially when you combine the knockout round with bad spring ice and tired legs and injuries.

In a wholly random universe, the expectation that teams from a single league would win three years straight is 1/32 (0.25 times 0.25 times 0.50). In our observed reality, this has happened twice in the 29 years it would be possible for a league to win three consecutive years. The point is that it's a rare enough event for people to begin to attribute causes to why such an event would occur. A fourth consecutive victory for a league, assuming the league only has one host year out of the four, would happen every 1 out of 128 seasons. That doesn't make the eventual QMJHL champions odds any worse—it is unlikely that anything that happened at the previous Memorial Cup impacts the London event in a significant way.