The Vegas Golden Knights and the Montreal Canadiens opened their conference-final series this week with shocks: Vegas beat the Colorado Avalanche 4-2 after taking a 2-0 lead into the third period and stretching it to 3-0, and Montreal rolled past the Carolina Hurricanes with four unanswered first-period goals and two more in the third to win Game 1.
Avalanche defenseman Cale Makar missed Colorado’s Game 2 at home as the Presidents' Trophy-winning Avalanche faltered; Colorado then blew a 3-0 first-period lead in Game 3 by allowing five unanswered goals and found itself on the verge of being swept out of the Western Conference finals.
The weight of those results is unmistakable in the numbers: both conference-finals favorites opened with 1-0 series deficits after the two upsets, and Elo rated the chance of both series-opening shocks at just 9.6 percent. Vegas’s 4-2 Game 1 and Montreal’s early six-goal surge were not isolated flashes — they changed the path toward the Stanley Cup for half of the final four in a single week.
Those moments followed a 2026 playoff field that mixed predictable outcomes and surprise runs through the first two rounds. The 2025 postseason ended with the Florida Panthers beating the Edmonton Oilers in the Stanley Cup Final, but this spring’s conference finals have been defined by sudden swing games: a 3-0 first-period lead surrendered, a Game 2 loss without a key defenseman, and strings of unanswered goals that have flipped series momentum.
There is also a broader scoring trend that matters for the chase to the Stanley Cup. Last season’s playoffs produced 3.10 goals per game in the postseason, a 2.1 percent rise from 3.04 goals per game in the regular season last spring — an uptick that runs counter to the long-term pattern. Since 2000, average goals per game have typically dropped from the regular season to the playoffs, a decline of about 6.2 percent overall; scoring has risen in the postseason only five times in that span, with the 2010 playoffs registering a 5.2 percent jump. Those shifts matter because sudden offensive bursts, like Montreal’s first period or Colorado’s blown lead, can decide a series before structure and defense reassert themselves.
That contrast — the expectation of the favorites and the reality on the ice — is the central tension now. The 2020s have shown the highest correlation between pre-playoff Elo ratings and playoff wins of any decade since at least the 1980s, which made these Game 1 losses noteworthy on paper as well as on the scoreboard. Yet the games themselves have offered new, stubborn evidence that a heavily favored seed can be unmade by a single hot period or a sequence of unanswered goals.
What happens next is urgent and narrow: can the Avalanche stop the slide and avoid the sweep they now face, and can the Hurricanes and Avalanche — both favorites coming into the conference finals — reassert the form that earned them those preseason billing? The answer will determine not only which teams advance toward the Stanley Cup but whether this postseason continues the recent, if rare, trend toward higher scoring bursts that upend probabilities. For Colorado, the math is simple and unforgiving: they must stop losing chunks of games and get whatever they can from the lineup without Cale Makar if he remains unavailable; if they cannot, the Presidents’ Trophy will have done little to slow an early exit.
For readers tracking the playoff arc, the internal dynamics of these series are already reshaping narratives about who can reach the Stanley Cup, and the next game will tell whether these early shocks were anomalies or the start of a new, unpredictable road to the Final. For a deeper look at how late surges have changed Cup paths in past playoffs, see Stanley Cup Winners: Marner’s late surge reshapes path to the Final and the Conned Smythe.
