NHL cup winners take the least amount of penalties.

So let's get this puck rolling.

My favorite hockey team is good in their own right, but they generally take way too many stupid penalties. Drives me crazy. But then I started thinking maybe it's worth it... so I decided to look into it. 

First, I checked the average per game penalty minutes for each year and for each team:

Damn, what was going in the 80s?

Okay, let's compare teams which get into the playoffs versus those that get a head start on the golf seasons:

Pretty cool. So in the early 90s, it seems that that taking penalties correlates with getting into the playoffs, but that this changed a decade later... I wonder why.

Now, what about the Cup winners? Let's see.

The first thing we see is that having a team of goons in the 1950s-70s was definitely an advantage. However, in the more recent era, this flipped (early 2000s excluded) and Cup winners actually got a lot less penalties.

I think I'll send this to my team.

(Source HockeyDB.com)