we have 170 participants in this year's bracket challenge and i have some data for you! a million bajillion thank yous to @tblueger who painstakingly went through and collected the data from everyone's brackets while i slept like a little baby unaware of all his hard work! let's get into the numbers!
33 of 170 participants chose florida to win the cup, with mtkachuk and his merry band of rats and sasha barkov earning 19.4% of the total votes! following that, vancouver got 25 votes and dallas just got by with 24. edmonton (19), carolina (18), colorado (15), and toronto (10) rounded out the most popular picks. at the bottom of the group, three people picked nashville, two people picked winnipeg and washington, one person each picked vegas and los angeles, and nobody at all had the islanders or the lightning taking it. last year only two people correctly guessed vegas, so anyone's guess is as good as ours.
now for some first round matchups!
in the battle of florida, 137 went for the panthers and 33 went for the bolts. apologies to mr. stamkos & crew, but you cannot beat the appeal of the mouthguard destroyer.
for caps vs rags, 49 people have washington utilizing maximum dr pepper power to take the series, while 121 took new york climbing to the second round. legally i cannot speak on this matchup without alerting the authorities to my presence but i personally am rooting for the old werewolf.
for the battle of the sebastian ahos, 148 people took jake guentzel & pals in carolina's victory, and 22 took new york instead. (fun fact! 14 people total have bet on round 2 being a battle of new york with the islanders vs the rangers. this is what many are referring to as "the bad place")
and rounding out the east, we have boston vs toronto! this is the most even split of any of the first round matchups in the entire league, with the leafs taking it for 75 people and the bruins taking it for the remaining 95. this matchup is being touted as the one most likely to get someone's father arrested for screaming at a television in a bar.
moving onto the west, we have 143 people letting connor mcdavid get a liiiiittle bit closer to tasting the sweet relief of happiness and having the oilers advance, while 27 are saying anze kopitar will use his raccoony wiles to outsmart him and have the kings move on. this matchup looks like halloween :)
for colorado vs winnipeg, nate mackinnon's iron will is moving the avalanche forward for 116 brackets, while the jets are showing their fiery resolve in the face of icy winds and pushing onward for 54. sometimes all i think about is you, heat waves in the middle of june.
for nashville vs vancouver, quinn hughes is being weekend at bernies'd into round 2 by the canucks in 139 brackets, while roman josi and jason zucker are the sexiest men in round 2 for the predators in 31. if the majority wins out here, i think there might be a statue of qhughes on every street corner in vancouver.
and last but not least, for dallas vs vegas, we had 137 people taking robo and the stars to round two, with 33 thanking the dr's for mark stone's miraculous recovery just in time for the golden knights to win the first round instead. this is the exact same split between tampa and florida! i don't know what that means, but probably something!
in total, we have 80 brackets going with a cup winner from the east and 90 saying the west will take it! last year i got into some data on the runner ups, but this year i forgot, and i'm not making theo do all of that again. this year's bracket seems much less chaos-focused than last year's, which is funny, because last year there was so much chaos in the actual results that hardly anyone got any points anyway. that means, unless a few people were very lucky choosing a few upsets all in the right order, this one's going to be a very close game right up until the end!
i'll be posting the leaderboard after the end of every round! good luck to all of us and godspeed to (checks my notes again) the florida panthers. may you beat the second annual rocky's league curse!