2. 0-11 in Elimination Games
If you read this far, you must be thinking "there is no way all this stuff happened to one team - they are like a reverse Forrest Gump in hockey team form."
And you'd be right, but it's all real.
And I didn't even get to the two worst things yet, so prepare yourself.
in 2016, the Toronto Maple Leafs made a surprise appearance in the Stanley Cup Playoffs. It was Auston Matthews rookie season, and no one expected them to make it, but they did. They went down to the Capitals 4 games to 2. They were just happy to be there. They hadn't made the playoffs since 2013 when they lost in the worst possible fashion to, who else, the Boston Bruins.
But things started getting weird the very next year.
Down 3-1 to Boston, the Leafs climbed all the way back but lost Game 7.
The next year they played Boston again and were up 3-2 before losing both of the last two games. Significantly, they had now lost four games in a row where they could have eliminated their opponent (counting 2013).
in 2020 they lost the fifth and deciding game to the Columbus Blue Jackets. In 2021 they were up 3-1 on Montreal but lost three games in a row. They are now up to an almost incomprehensible eight game losing streak while having their opponents face elimination.
Unfortunately, the very next year they had to play the Lightning and lost another two games with their opponents on the ropes. Ten times in a row the Leafs had a chance to get to the second round and they lost all ten times.
The next year it was Tampa again, and once again with the chance to put their opponent away, the Leafs lost. That made it 11 in a row. That might seem pretty bad, but people started to do the math and it's so much worse than you thought.
The odds of this happening were 1 time in 10, 000. Put another way, according to the link above from Yahoo, if you found gambling odds that were +100,000, which you basically can't even do, they would have a 10x higher chance of happening than what happened to the Leafs.
So keep that in mind the next time you're ripping on Kyle Dubas - he quite literally has the unluckiest record of any GM in the history of the NHL.