Which players are most deserving of winning the Stanley Cup?

ByGreg Wyshynski

Friday, May 2, 2025

One by one, the Florida Panthers skated with the Stanley Cup after winning Game 7 of last year's Final. It was a familiar feeling for some of those who had lifted it before, such asCarter Verhaeghe. But for the majority of the roster, this was their first time touching the chalice.

One of them was Kyle Okposo. "I almost retired, and they're a big reason why I didn't," he said of his teammates. "I wanted to have one more crack at it, and I just wanted to put myself in the best position to do this."

So after 17 seasons, 1,051 regular-season games and 41 more in the postseason, the 37-year-old finally achieved his NHL dream.

As the Panthers pushed for the championship, Okposo had become the playoffs' quintessential "Old Guy Without a Cup" whom fans rallied around. But simply having a work history and a long-ago draft year doesn't always portend Stanley Cup worthiness. There are other factors to consider, from how those players performed in postseasons past to how close they have come to raising the Cup.

We take everything into account in our Cup Worthiness Ratings (CWR), which seek to define the veteran and in-their-prime players most deserving of raising Stanley.

We began by taking active skaters whose teams are still in the playoffs with the greatest number of regular-season games played without having won the Stanley Cup, with 850 as the cutoff. There were 21 in total at the start, and we reverse-ranked them to award points; i.e.,Ryan Suter played the most games (1,526) without winning a Cup, so he received 21 points.

We did the same for career playoff games and playoff points. We then added the number of years they've been in the league to that score -- something that also served as a tiebreaker between players with the same score.

It was Alfred, Lord Tennyson who wrote: "'Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." That love can also be bitter. Hence, we're factoring into the CWR how close a player has come to drinking from the chalice.

If a player reached the conference final, they received five points for each appearance. If they reached the Stanley Cup Final, that was an additional 10 points. If they were traded by an eventual Stanley Cup-winning team (within the next two seasons) that was worth five points. (Please note that Claude Giroux's decision to leave the Panthers as a free agent before they won the Cup does not count.)

We wanted to factor in the prestige of a player in our rankings. Let's face it, there's more pressure on a star player to round out their "legacy" with a championship than there is for the rank and file. It was an issue for players such asAlex Ovechkin and Nathan MacKinnon before it wasn't anymore. Players like Connor McDavid are now experiencing the weight of that expectation. So, to that end, we added five points to the score if that player ever won an NHL award, using that as a mark of stardom.

We also gave 10 points to any player who won the Conn Smythe for playoff MVP in a losing effort in the Stanley Cup Final. Could you imagine how heartbreaking that would be?

With that, here are the top 10 most deserving veteran players (minimum 850 games) still in the 2025 postseason based on their CWR.