Which players are most deserving of winning the Stanley Cup?

One by one, the Florida Panthers skated with the Stanley Cup after winning Game 7 of last year’s Final. It was a familiar feeling for some of those who had lifted it before, such as Carter Verhaeghe. But for the majority of the roster, this was their first time touching the chalice.

One of them was Kyle Okposo. “I almost retired, and they’re a big reason why I didn’t,” he said of his teammates. “I wanted to have one more crack at it, and I just wanted to put myself in the best position to do this.”

So after 17 seasons, 1,051 regular-season games and 41 more in the postseason, the 37-year-old finally achieved his NHL dream.

As the Panthers pushed for the championship, Okposo had become the playoffs’ quintessential “Old Guy Without a Cup” whom fans rallied around. But simply having a work history and a long-ago draft year doesn’t always portend Stanley Cup worthiness. There are other factors to consider, from how those players performed in postseasons past to how close they have come to raising the Cup.

We take everything into account in our Cup Worthiness Ratings (CWR), which seek to define the veteran and in-their-prime players most deserving of raising Stanley.

We began by taking active skaters whose teams are still in the playoffs with the greatest number of regular-season games played without having won the Stanley Cup, with 850 as the cutoff. There were 21 in total at the start, and we reverse-ranked them to award points; i.e., Ryan Suter played the most games (1,526) without winning a Cup, so he received 21 points.

We did the same for career playoff games and playoff points. We then added the number of years they’ve been in the league to that score — something that also served as a tiebreaker between players with the same score.

It was Alfred, Lord Tennyson who wrote: “‘Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” That love can also be bitter. Hence, we’re factoring into the CWR how close a player has come to drinking from the chalice.

If a player reached the conference final, they received five points for each appearance. If they reached the Stanley Cup Final, that was an additional…