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The Montreal Canadiens beat the Pittsburgh Penguins 3 - 1 in their best of 5 series of qualifying round of the 2019-20 Stanley Cup playoffs. The heavy underdogs pulled of the upset without scoring a single power play goal.

Which teams have managed to win a Stanley cup playoff series (at least a best of 5) without scoring any power play goals?

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  • If I find time i'll investigate more, but I suspect the list is quite long - you may want to narrow this some. PPG are rare enough that I suspect it's not that uncommon, especially in years past when scoring was harder to come by, and I'm not sure an answer with 100 games in it or something is a great idea.
    – Joe ♦
    Aug 18, 2020 at 22:55
  • I think it's already a rare occurrence for a team to win a series without any PPG. You'd have to outplay another playoff team 3 or 4 games without getting a PPG (and the games in the series which you lose). Teams that struggle in PPs don't tend to do well in the playoffs (general statement, doesn't apply to all teams obviously).
    – alamoot
    Aug 19, 2020 at 0:02
  • I don't disagree, but 'rare' in the context of the NHL playoffs, which has... thousands? ... of series in the original 6 - now era, might still come up a lot :) And... Blackhawks fan here, very familiar with teams being quite terrible at powerplay and still winning (see: 2013 Cup finals... almost on this list!)
    – Joe ♦
    Aug 19, 2020 at 15:36
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    Leaving this here so I have it... to do this programatically, start with the year pages hockey-reference.com/playoffs/NHL_2013.html and find the league playoff series table, hit the View Matchup page, find the winning team, and then find the Team Total line in the Series Stats for that team, to get their PPG count.
    – Joe ♦
    Aug 19, 2020 at 16:20
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    Sooo guess who ended up scrapping for it, the same day he said he prob wouldn't do it for months??
    – alamoot
    Aug 20, 2020 at 4:41

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Scraping off Hockey Reference, I found 61 instances where a team didn't score a Power Play Goal (PPG) since 1934. Hockey Reference only shows PPGs starting 1934, hence why the data starts from then. Also, I've only looked at series, where the winning team won 3 or more games to satisfy the best-of-5 or higher criteria of the question.

As of the end of the 2020-2021 season, there have been 16 teams winning such playoff series (26.23% of all such occurrences), 3 of which happened this season! Half of the series were best-of-7, other half were best-of-5. Here are the series:

Bonus: There have been 5 series where neither team scored a PPG:

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