Conn Smythe is the playoff MVP — and its market depends on bracket position
I’ve been pricing Conn Smythe markets for over a decade, and the single most useful realisation I had was this: you can’t bet this market sensibly until you know which two teams are likely to make the final. Before the Conference Finals, Conn Smythe odds are essentially a leveraged bet on which team wins the Cup, with the player layer adding noise. After the Conference Finals, the market becomes a genuine MVP race within a known two-team field. That’s where the pricing gets interesting.
Conn Smythe odds price the NHL’s playoff MVP award. The Conn Smythe Trophy is presented annually to the player judged most valuable during the Stanley Cup playoffs, voted on by a panel of writers from the Professional Hockey Writers’ Association. Unlike the Hart Trophy, the Conn Smythe is decided after the playoffs end — the panel votes before Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final (or before the final game of the series, whatever round it ends in), with the trophy awarded immediately after the Cup is presented.
The Conn Smythe market opens when the playoff bracket is set in mid-April, with prices on contender-team forwards, goalies and a handful of defencemen. The market shifts substantially after each round as eliminated teams drop out, until by the Cup Final it’s a tight competition between roughly six players from the two finalists. The pricing structure across rounds is what makes Conn Smythe odds different from any other futures product.
Mechanics: the voting panel and the timing
The Conn Smythe voting panel is small — typically 18 to 21 writers, depending on the year — and they cast ballots before the final game of the Stanley Cup Final. Each writer submits a single name. The player with the most votes wins.
The timing of the vote is critical to understanding the market. Voters cast their ballots before Game 7 (or the equivalent series-deciding game), which means the vote can favour a player from the losing team if that player’s performance across the entire playoff run has been more impactful than anyone on the winning team. This is rare but it happens, and the market never quite prices it correctly.
The presentation of the trophy happens immediately after the Cup is awarded. The winner is brought to centre ice, the trophy is handed over, and the moment is part of the Cup Final broadcast. The Edmonton Oilers earned approximately $15 million per game during their Stanley Cup Final run in 2025 — a record per-game ticket revenue in hockey history. The Conn Smythe ceremony sits inside that broadcast window, with the entire playoff hockey audience watching. The visibility produces a feedback loop with the voting: voters know the player they pick will receive a televised trophy presentation, which subtly biases voting toward narrative-friendly winners.
The voting criteria are nominally based on the entire playoff run — not just the final series. In practice, the final series weights heavily because it’s freshest in the voters’ memory and most heavily covered. A player who carried his team through three earlier rounds but went quiet in the final often loses the trophy to a player who emerged in the final itself.
The goalie bias
The Conn Smythe Trophy goes to a goalie far more often than the Hart Trophy does. Roughly a third of Conn Smythe winners across the past four decades have been goalies — Jonathan Quick, Tim Thomas, Patrick Roy, Cam Ward — compared to roughly one goalie per decade for the Hart Trophy.
The structural reason: playoff series are short, and a hot goalie can dominate a series in a way that no skater can. A goalie who steals a series with a 0.940 save percentage and two shutouts produces a visible MVP-level performance even if the team scores only 2 goals per game in those wins. The narrative — the goalie carrying the team — is the cleanest MVP story in playoff hockey, and the voting panel rewards it consistently.
Pricing implications: in any Stanley Cup Final, the starting goalies of both teams should be in the top three favourites for Conn Smythe regardless of skater talent. A goalie at 5.0 in the Cup Final is rarely overpriced. A goalie at 8.0 or 10.0 when his team has any reasonable chance to win is often a genuine value position.
The exception: when a team wins the Cup with offensive dominance — sweeping or near-sweeping the final with 4+ goals per game — the goalie bias breaks and the leading scorer of the winning team takes the trophy. McDavid in 2024, Crosby in 2017, Henrik Zetterberg in 2008. The market reads these scenarios correctly when the offensive disparity is visible in the early games of the final.
Pricing by round: the curve
The Conn Smythe market opens when the playoffs begin. Pre-playoff prices favour stars on contender teams: Connor McDavid, Nathan MacKinnon, Auston Matthews, top goalies on Cup contenders, and a sprinkling of defencemen. The price range in the opening market is 8.0 to 25.0 for the headline names, with the entire field stretching to 100.0 and beyond.
After the first round, half the field is eliminated and the market compresses substantially. A player on a team that’s been swept in the first round is removed entirely. Players on first-round winners shorten — a 25.0 price might move to 14.0 simply on the team’s advancement.
After the second round (Conference Semifinals), four teams remain and the market is dominated by players from those four. Headline names on remaining teams sit at 4.0 to 8.0; goalies of the four remaining teams cluster at 6.0 to 12.0. Players on eliminated teams are removed.
After the Conference Finals — when only two teams remain — the market is at its tightest. The starting goalies of both finalists are usually the two favourites at 3.5 to 5.0 each. The leading skater of each finalist sits at 5.0 to 8.0. Secondary names from each finalist run from 12.0 to 30.0. The Stanley Cup Final 2025 between Florida and Edmonton averaged about 2.5 million US viewers across the series, peaking at 2.8 million for Game 6 on TNT and truTV — viewership that anchors the visibility of Conn Smythe candidates and supports the tightness of the final pricing.
The final-stage market is where the structural value lives. The starting goalie of the losing finalist often holds genuine win equity — the panel votes before Game 7, and a losing-team goalie with elite series numbers can take the trophy. Pricing him at 6.0 or 7.0 is sometimes correct relative to the chalk on the winning side.
Betting windows: when to enter and when to exit
The pre-playoff window has the longest prices but also the highest variance. A 20.0 price on a top scorer requires (a) his team to advance through three rounds, (b) his team to win or come close in the final, and (c) him to outperform his teammates and the opposing goalie. That’s a long chain of conditions. The pre-playoff position is high-variance and best treated as a small-stake position rather than a primary bet.
The second-round window — after the first round resolves — is where positional value often opens. A player whose team has just advanced and whose price has shortened from 25.0 to 14.0 might still be undervalued if the team’s path through the next two rounds is favourable. The implied probability at 14.0 is roughly 7 percent, and the structural model often supports 10 to 12 percent on the right candidate.
The Conference Finals window is the cleanest entry point for most punters. Four teams remain, you can see who’s hot, you can see who’s healthy, and the prices haven’t fully compressed yet. A goalie at 8.0 entering the Conference Finals who advances to the Cup Final is usually shortening to 4.0 or 5.0 before the final starts.
The Hart Trophy market that closes when this one opens
The Hart Trophy and Conn Smythe markets are the two pillars of NHL individual-award betting, and they don’t overlap in time. The Hart closes when the regular season ends in mid-April; the Conn Smythe opens roughly the same day the playoffs start. They reward different things — regular-season most-valuable versus playoff-run most-valuable — and the same player rarely wins both in the same year. The full breakdown of how the regular-season MVP market is priced and what shifts the voting is in our Hart Trophy odds breakdown.
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