Who Will Win The Stanley Cup According To NHL 19

There's an annual tradition within sports games to always attempt to pinpoint the winner of the playoff champions using the latest simulations in the video games. EA has made it a tradition to always highlight the potential winner of the Super Bowl each year using the latest iteration of Madden NFL, and now the company has decided to focus its attention on another sporting event this year: the Stanley Cup. The yearly playoffs in the National Hockey League for the 2019 season was given the video game simulation treatment, with EA Sports putting the finals through a what-if scenario within this year's outing of NHL 19, and the results may be more surprising than you originally thought.

The video was posted up over on the official EA Sports NHL YouTube channel, featuring just a minute and a half worth of gameplay. After going through a few of the top names likely to standout during the 2019 playoff season, the video narrows down the western conference playoffs semi-finals, which then narrows down into the finals between the Nashville Predators and the San Jose Sharks. The simulation gives the western conference championship to the Sharks, while on the eastern side we have the finals rounding out with the Toronto Maple Leafs taking on the Columbus Blue Jackets. The Maple Leafs pick up the win to go on to take on the Sharks, with a series tied 3-3 by game 7. We finally see some clips from the game 7 simulation with the Toronto Maple Leafs picking up the win to become the 2019 Stanley Cup Champions.

The comment section is the real story, though. Majority of the commenters scoffed at the results, saying that the only time we're going to see the Toronto Maple Leafs as the Stanley Cup winners is in an NHL 19 simulation.

Others got a little bit more in depth about why they felt the simulation of the EA Sports title was a bit misguided, pointing out that the Toronto Maple Leafs don't have the defense to withstand the offensive onslaught by some other teams.

The thing with simulations is that they're usually based on the numbers attached to the real life players. So there's really no way to know for sure if things turn out that way or not, but more times than not the recent simulations that EA Sports have put out for events like the Super Bowl using the different Madden NFL iterations have actually be eerily accurate, right down to the plays and the scores.

Unfortunately, we don't get to see specifically what sort of plays were utilized during the simulation for some reason, nor do we see how the scores tallied up between each period, but we can basically sum up that it was a close game with some tough match-ups based on the simulation moving the playoffs into game 7.

NHL 19 is available right now for PS4 and Xbox One. You can run your own simulations for the Stanley Cup if you're not satisfied with EA's simulation of the 2019 season.