The Lightning beat the Canadiens again last night, and while we haven’t seen odds on the rest of the series from the market, the gist of the situation is that this is firmly the Lightning’s Stanley Cup to lose. Our model has Tampa Bay roughly 90% likely to win their third and fourth game before Montreal can get to four, and our model, as we’ve been noting, includes no discount for any lessening of home-ice advantage that will occur in Quebec thanks to the Habs having to admit a much smaller crowd than their opponent.
With that, the model does see a solid chance for the Canadiens tomorrow night, as one would expect. It has the Lightning as 0.60-goal favorites, which translates to a 56.2% win probability for the visitors, or about five-in-nine. The most likely outcome is that the Lightning take a 3-0 lead, but that’s far from assured. Maybe the home-ice really will end up mattering. With no counterfactual, we won’t ever know. At the moment, though, the question only values to people who both care and have a highly sophisticated understanding of probability, thereby understanding how significant a leap from 90% to 92% or whatever is and isn’t.
