Our NHL Model is live, just in time for Game 1 tonight in this year’s Stanley Cup Finals. Here’s what it thinks about tonight’s game, the series as a whole, and the NHL landscape at large:
Tonight
The model has the Canadiens as a 38.8% underdog, with the Lightning therefore favored to win in 61.2% of simulations. This means the model is more confident in the Canadiens than the market is, as the market implies a win probability of about 35.7% for Montreal and 64.3% for Tampa Bay.
Some of this might be those personnel upgrades the Lightning made specifically for the playoffs, exploiting some loopholes in the NHL’s roster rules to do so. Some of it might be that our model got very high (and remains hypothetically high) on the Vegas Golden Knights, whom the Canadiens just beat. Some of it might be that the NHL’s schedule this year introduces uncertainty into each series in the final two rounds of the playoffs that wasn’t previously there. Whatever the cause, our model likes the Canadiens. Relatively speaking.
To Win the Stanley Cup
Our model is similarly high on the Canadiens to win the series, putting them at 37.6% likely to pull it off while Bovada’s odds, at least, imply only a 32% chance of them winning. I’m inclined to be a bit skeptical of that 32% number—one thing I expect our model to do a good job of is to reflect how series probabilities should compare to individual game probabilities. It’s possible I’m off on that, but the model’s understanding of home-ice advantage and how much better/worse teams might play than expected shouldn’t be far off of the market’s capacity to judge those things.
If I had to guess, this is the market reacting to Montreal’s lower capacity limit than Florida’s, but with hockey, there are advantages to having home ice beyond just crowd noise, and it’s not like the arena’s going to be empty in Quebec.
Overall
Our model does still think the Colorado Avalanche are the best team in the NHL, followed by Vegas, who Montreal just beat. It has the Lightning as the third-best team, though well within striking distance of those two above them, and the Canadiens as the seventh-best team, up from 21st at regular season’s end (for context, the North Division’s best team was viewed as the 10th-best team and is now viewed as the 12th-best, while the Lightning have risen from being viewed as the 9th-best to their current 3rd-best outlook). The Canadiens can climb all the way to first if they win the series and do it handily, but the median result is that they lose the series and stay seventh-best. That’s how this works.
