NHL Blowout Index

Which NHL teams win or lose big against what the moneyline expected. An average against the number hides how a team got there: +4 can be covering by 3 every night or winning by 25 and losing by 15. Index 100 = a typical team’s share of games decided by 2+ goals against the moneyline-implied margin; the two columns beside it split that into big covers and big misses. Click a team for every game.

The puck line is a fixed ±1.5, so it isn’t a balancing number: a −1.5 favorite at +130 misses it by 3+ about twice as often as it covers by 3+. So here the number is the margin the consensus closing moneyline implies (fit from every game in the feed: a 60% favorite, roughly −150, is expected to win by 0.5 goals; a 70% favorite, roughly −235, by 1.2), and result vs the number = final margin minus that. League-wide in this view, 22% of games beat the number by 2+ and 22% missed it by 2+ (508 team-games). We checked whether this is a team trait: across 2024–26 a team’s share of lopsided results in one half of a season says almost nothing about the other half, or about next season (correlations near zero in every sport; MLB is at most about +0.1 once it’s measured against the moneyline rather than the run line, which is within noise). Read it as how a record was built, not as a forecast. The alt columns are real bets: flat 1 unit on the posted puck line rung that needs the team to beat its moneyline-implied margin by 2+ (a 60% favorite expected to win by about 0.5 → the rung needing 3+), and on the opponent’s rung that needs the team to fall 2+ short of it, at the median closing price across the sportsbooks. League-wide here that returned -20.1% on 479 bets at a typical +270 — the vig on longshot rungs, which is what a team has to overcome to show up green.