How often Stanley Cup winners touch the conference championship trophies

Many Edmonton Oilers fans gasped after watching their team celebrate their Western Conference Final win on Thursday night.

While the fan base was over the moon to see their team advance to their second straight Stanley Cup Final, many were aghast when they saw Connor McDavid touch the Clarence Campbell Bowl. It’s been a long-running superstition that touching the trophy is bad luck, but after choosing not to touch it a year ago, the Oilers captain elected to switch things up.

 

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“We didn’t last year, give it a go this year,” McDavid told Sportsnet’s Gene Principe. “I didn’t know what was going to happen when we got up there.”

The Florida Panthers are heading to their third straight Stanley Cup Final. They lost in 2023 after touching the Prince of Wales Trophy, but won in 2024 when they didn’t. So naturally, Panthers captain Aleksander Barkov refused to touch it again this year.

But that’s not the case every time.

Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins opted not to touch the Prince of Wales Trophy in 2008 and went on to lose to the Detroit Red Wings. He touched it in 2009, 2016, and 2017, and the Penguins won each time.

Here is a look at the results of who has and hasn’t touched the conference championship trophies since 2000. The yes/no beside each team’s name indicates whether they touched their respective trophy or opted not to.

As you can see, the fun yet wacky superstition doesn’t seem to hold any sort of real merit, as 11 of the last 24 Stanley Cup champs have touched it (45.8 per cent). Meanwhile, just nine of the last 24 teams who fell in the Cup Final opted to touch it (37.5 per cent).

While the outcome of what should be a fantastic series remains to be seen, the chart above provides more than enough evidence that neither team’s decision on whether or not to touch their respective trophy will have any sort of indication of how things play out.

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