This is one of the most unique crops of Stanley Cup playoff teams we’ve seen in recent memory. We assembled a nine-person, anonymous panel of high-level NHL front-office executives and senior staff. We asked each person to sort all 16 playoff teams into Tiers 1-5 and tallied the average votes. While panelists were instructed to think of Tier 1 as the league’s inner circle of Cup favorites (roughly 3-4 teams), several executives were reluctant to include more than two clubs in that category. The result is a smaller top tier than expected, which is a telling sign of how uncertain this playoff field is.