With the first round of the 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs in the rearview mirror, it’s time for one of my favorite annual traditions: digging into how playoff rosters are constructed and examining the characteristics of the players and teams that are playing for the Stanley Cup.
Player acquisition type
There are several ways to acquire players en route to building a playoff team: drafting and developing, trades, free agency, and even the waiver wire. Let’s take a look at how the 16 teams that made the playoffs this season assembled their rosters.
While the saying goes “build through the draft,” not all playoff teams follow that mantra equally. For example, Colorado, Minnesota, and Vegas relied heavily on trades, while Los Angeles boasts a roster that’s nearly 52 percent homegrown. One of the more interesting items that pops out to me is that the last two Stanley Cup champions, Vegas and Florida, have the lowest percentage of players that they drafted.
It’s also interesting to break down who is scoring goals by acquisition type.
When you take a simplistic approach and look at the average goals scored per game by acquisition type, you can see that players acquired via the draft still produce at a high rate compared to any other acquisition method. In the above chart, the exception is expansion, which is made up of just one player still on the Vegas Golden Knights, William Karlsson. He has three goals in his 10 playoff games so far (0.3 goals per game), which skews expansion into the method of acquisition scoring at the highest rate.
Draft rounds
Draft round distribution offers another lens into how playoff talent is sourced. Unsurprisingly, first-rounders make up a significant chunk of rosters, but value can also be found later.
It’s fascinating to see that 26 percent of Florida’s roster is made up of undrafted players, while only 25 percent of Tampa Bay’s roster consists of first-round draft picks.
Roster age breakdown
Youth and experience both have value in the playoffs. Here’s a look at the average age of each team:
I was surprised to see that the Washington Capitals are the youngest team remaining, while the Edmonton Oilers are the most seasoned. It’s also very interesting to see that the four youngest teams in the Eastern Conference were eliminated in the first round.
Height and weight of playoff rosters
The size of a player isn’t always an important factor in today’s NHL, but it’s still fun to examine the physical profile of each team’s playoff roster. Over the years, we’ve seen this fluctuate across the league, depending on which type of roster has won most recently (i.e., a team built on speed and skill versus a team built on size and physicality).
It’s hard to draw meaningful insights from simply looking at the average height and weight of playoff teams, but it is intriguing that the three tallest teams—Dallas, Vegas, and Washington—are still alive in the playoffs. Meanwhile, the three lightest teams—Colorado, Minnesota, and Montreal—have been eliminated.
The below visual is challenging to read, but it gives you some insight on the distribution of height and weight of the playoff rosters:
Nationalities of players
Another interesting angle to consider is where players were born. Here’s a look at the international makeup of each team’s playoff roster:
As usual, Canadian players have the highest percentage, but there’s plenty of international flavor. Colorado and Toronto have the most American-born players with 39 and 38 percent respectively. Minnesota had the highest percent of Swedish players with 23. Edmonton has the fewest number of American players with two: Trent Frederic and Ty Emberson. Edmonton is also “Canada’s team” with 67 percent of its roster being Canadian.
Cap hit snapshot
Finally, let’s talk some salary cap. The salary cap goes away in the playoffs, but if it were a thing, here’s a look at each team’s playoff roster salary cap, based on average annual values (AAV) of players who have made it into games.
This wraps up our 2025 Stanley Cup Playoffs roster breakdown. If there’s another angle or stat you’d like me to dig into, feel free to drop a note in the comments or shoot me a message.
Enjoy the playoffs!
Great article. Definitely sheds greater light on many of the generalizations and assumptions fans express when it comes to building a contending hockey team. No two teams get there the same way.
Not asking you to do it, but would be interesting to see the same analysis applied to Stanley Cup winners over some period of time, like 10 years. We would likely see the same variations in age, draft position topology, etc…but ALWAYS more Canadians than Americans. 😉
Great stuff. I know this is probably a hassle, but I’d be curious about the relationship between acquisition and minutes. In other words… how are “top line” and “top pair” players on playoff teams acquired?
Thanks again John.
Go Kraken!!!
It’s a great question. The intuitive answer is that the best players are usually drafted and the rest are filled in via trade/FA (Rantanen and VGK being the obvious exceptions). Mcdavid/Draisaitl/Bouchard, Makar/Mackinnon, Barkov/Ekblad, Matthews/Marner/Nylander, Aho/Svech/Slavin, Scheifle/Connor/Morrissey.
You essentially need at least one point per game forward and a #1 Dman to be a cup contender. The Kraken currently have neither, and are reportedly considering trading away assets to get filler and be “more competitive”. My concern is that they’ll basically resign themselves to a LAK type of ceiling — playoff makers but not cup contenders. Our only hope is if Shane, Matty, and Dunn all take big steps forward. That’s a tough bet to make.
Masterful stuff John. Thank u
Just excellent, John. One thing that jumps out at me is the Player Acquisition Type graph.
With the exception of LAK, DAL, MTL and STL, the other 12 playoff teams teams’ acquired at least 60% of their rosters via a combination of free agency or trade (the average for those 12 teams was 71%). Given the farm system’s lack high-end talent and ownership’s obvious lack of patience suggests the Kraken front office may be forced to go this route as well. Oh boy here we go…
My take was basically as I thought, FA is a great place to find mid to low level pieces but your top end and the nucleus of your team needs to come via draft or trading pieces usually via draft. Yes there is a number of ways to build a team but the key pieces is really the important part of the equation… your not going to find that through FA generally speaking. Not that they can’t be found though FA but the overpayment factor puts your team at a disadvantage.
For all the whining about exploiting LTIR for the playoffs, I’m really surprised that only 2 teams are over the cap.
That said, it would be interesting to take a closer look at how those dollars are allocated to different players – who has a lot of money tied up in only a few players vs who has spread it throughout their lineup.
The salary cap figures only show players who have played, not rostered. According to some other websites, 12 of the 16 playoff teams were over the cap. NYI only team over the cap to miss playoffs.
I would say any player to end season on LTIR would not be eligible to play in the 1st round. If a team wants to gamble they can get out of the 1st round without Tkachuk so they can bypass the salary cap rule… that’s their decision. Same with Vegas and Stone a few years ago.
The absolute dominance of players picked in the first round and the large percentage of Canadian-born players point to a massive talent deficiency in the league. I hate to admit it, but it looks like the league has over-expanded in relation to its talent base. Did I do that?
It would be interesting to look at share of goals/points driven by acquisition type. I would imagine free agents are common for 4th liners but the bulk of super stars are home grown.
I love the Cap Hit Snapshot, especially now that the NHL is instituting CAP compliancy in the playoffs. Would love to see this chart for the past 5-7 years!