Losing the Edmonton Oilers Stanley Cup means they are missing out on an extremely rare sport Achi-News

If the Edmonton Oilers had won the Stanley Cup, they would have secured their names in history not only for being champions but also for achieving an extremely rare feat: winning a championship after being down three games in the final round of a game best – a series of seven.

No team in Major League Baseball or the National Basketball Association has done it, although some teams have earned victories in other playoff series.

The last – and only – NHL team to lift Lord Stanley’s Cup after losing three straight games was the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1942.

“There aren’t many teams that are down 3-0 that have the innate ability to bounce back from that or the mental fortitude especially to be able to win those back-to-back games,” said sports analyst Neil Paine told Global News.

Paine watches and calculates game statistics closely, and said the numbers reveal something even more impressive about the Oilers’ win Monday night, had it happened.

The team had just a 3.3 percent chance of winning after Game 3, when the Florida Panthers won 4-3 and outscored the Oilers 11-4 in the first three contests.

The 3.3 percent is an Elo rating — a number determined by taking into account things like a team’s regular and postseason performance, its goal differential and even whether it was playing a home game, Paine said. He adjusts after every game.

“We have these ratings calculated for every game in NHL history going back to 1918,” he said, speaking from Bentonville, Ark.

“And so you can really see the ebb and flow of a team’s quality and performance over time.”

The Oilers’ 3.3 percent was not the lowest an 0-3 team has ever had in a series, Paine told Global News; that ignoble distinction belongs to the 1975 New York Islanders, who battled back to win the quarterfinals against the Pittsburgh Penguins despite a 2.8 percent chance of doing so.

But the Oilers’ score “is certainly the lowest we’ve seen in the Stanley Cup Finals,” Paine said.

“It’s really scary to even see a team come back and tie the series,” he said, because hockey is such a team game.

“If there’s a mismatch between the better team and the better player, the team with the better team from top to bottom tends to win in the Stanley Cup Finals, historically speaking.”

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Kevin Lowe, who played for the Edmonton Oilers for 14 full seasons and won five Stanley Cup championships, told Global News that it is difficult to come back from a 0-3 deficit because a lot of things can go wrong.

“Typically, at this stage of the season, the teams are pretty evenly matched and it’s hard to beat a four straight team,” he said. “Even though you might be a much better team, once you get on your streak of winning your games, it could be a five-minute penalty or there could be some weird things going on in the game.”

Lowe said looking at the first three games, the Oilers made mistakes that gave the Panthers a chance to create an offense that led to more goals.

He pointed to some of Florida’s first field goals in the series, saying they were defendable with “simple stick-on-puck plays” but because of those mistakes, the goals went in.

“If defenders – any normal defender you know – do the normal thing, probably … those two goals don’t even happen,” Lowe said. “It’s not like Florida made an unbelievable, offensive surge to create those goals. They still had to put it in the net.”

He said after Game 3, an Oilers win would have depended on an Edmonton team cleaning up those mistakes and eliminating the Panthers’ ability to score

Speaking before Game 7, he said a win for either team would be “awesome for the sport.”

“Florida wins its first Stanley Cup, and that’s a big thing,” he said.

– with files from Eric Sorensen and Sean Previl of Global News

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