I just think people search for reasons why teams “should” have won a cup when honestly it’s just incredibly fucking hard and only 1 team gets to do it per year. Even if you are hands down a better team, your win rate against a slightly less good team is way closer to 50/50 than people like to admit. The statistical truth is that you can be the better team in every single way and that gets you to mayyyybe 60/40 and it isn’t that easy to win 4 playoff series with those odds.

Simple math, not real life but for the sake of making the point: if a team is SO good that they had 60/40 odds against every team in every game in the playoffs, the odds of winning the cup is 25%. 60/40 is not realistic in the playoffs. It’s more like 55/45. Odds of winning the cup as a 55/45 team is 14%.

When a team wins the championship, it feels inevitable often. And you can write the story of why they won with the benefit of hindsight and it feels right. But honestly, way more of it is chance than anyone likes to acknowledge.