NHL Betting: What’s home-ice advantage worth?
The “best” teams at home or on the road, and the moneyline betting guide for the weekend
Pop quiz, Hot Shot - Who’s the best home team in the NHL this season?
We’re not sitting at the bar, playing Google Chicken - seeing who will crack and look up the NHL standings and the “home record” column. You can look it up all you want and come back to this column. I’ll wait.
While you look it up, I’ll admit something to you. I don’t know who has the best home record in the NHL, so, I myself, will go look it up right now…
Unsurprisingly, the team with the best home record is the Winnipeg Jets (22-8 on the moneyline). This makes sense because, you know, they have the best overall record in the league.
However, if we’re focusing on the HOME part, a 73.3% winning percentage is “only” an 8% difference from their road record (17-9). If you were a Jets fan, you’d be content with us suggesting that Winnipeg isn’t just a very good home team, but simply a very good team. Full stop.
Home/Road Splits
Since we’re bettors, the team we’re looking for, regarding our one-question pop-quiz, is the team whose results increase the most when playing at home compared to the road. Here are your contenders for that back-handed honor:
Los Angeles Kings: 17-5 (77.2%) vs. 12-19 (38.7%) = +38.5%
Carolina Hurricanes: 21-7 (75.0%) vs. 12-16 (42.8%) = +32.2%
Columbus Blue Jackets: 17-10 (63.0%) vs. 9-20 (31.0%) = +32.0%
Nashville Predators: 13-13 (50.0%) vs. 6-22 (21.4%) = +28.6%
Boston Bruins: 18-12 (60.0%) vs. 9-18 (33.3%) = +26.6%
Ottawa Senators: 16-9 (64.0%) vs. 13-18 (41.9%) = +22.15%
Yes, we’ve slightly changed the parameters for “best” here, but it’s important to note that a handful of teams have a drastically different record at home.
Like most things in sports betting, hindsight is cool, but this is the type of information that would have been helpful before the season started. Which begs the question, do these six teams have a distinct home-ice advantage? One that could have been predicted before the season using their home/road splits from last season?
Spoiler alert: No.
The six teams above combined to go 134-112 at home and 120-126 on the road. The Kings, Hurricanes, Predators, and Bruins had virtually identical splits, so you’d need something of a crystal ball to assume the Senators (21-20 vs. 16-25) and Blue Jackets (17-24 vs. 10-31) were going to excel at home this season.
On the flip side, a couple of teams have been really good on the road this season. The Capitals are 19-9 (compared to 17-10 at home), but the team with the biggest differential in their split this season is the Wild (20-9 vs. 13-13 at home: +18.9%). Just two other teams even have a road record more than one game above .500 and a sizable differential compared to their home results: Utah (+18.7%) and Vancouver (+16.3%).
Both Utah and Vancouver have lost an inordinate number of home games after regulation, which explains their unusually rough home records.
Home-ice Advantage
Now that we know this information, is there anything we can do for the stretch run? Alas, not really. There’s no guarantee that the 10 teams mentioned above keep up these splits.
The overall point is that home-ice advantage is tough to assess individually, franchise-to-franchise. The best that we can do is assess what home-ice means in general, and it’s actually up from the 2022-23 season (3%).
Last year (2023-‘24), home teams went 710-602 for 54.1%.
Prior to the 4 Nations Face-off break, home teams went 484-406 for 54.4%.
Over 2202 games over the last season-and-a-half, home teams were just over 4% more likely to win than the road teams.
As we referenced before the season, you take a team’s power rating (which we looked at last week here) to find out a neutral site win probability and then apply home-ice. For example, if two average teams met on neutral territory, they’d be 50/50, and the sportsbook would price it at -110/-110. Putting that same game on one team’s home ice turns it into a 46%/54% matchup (before the sportsbook takes their “juice”).
That same percentage adjustment applies to any matchup. A 75%/25% matchup becomes either 79%/21% (-376/+376) or 71%/29% (-245/+245) before the sportsbook’s pricing.
Unfortunately, all this is to get to the point that we’ll continue to apply 4% to a home-ice advantage because past success or failure don’t necessarily predict future results, and all the teams with arenas that are “tough places to play” usually have that reputation because the team is really tough to beat.
However, if you’re close to a valuable bet on the Senators or Blue Jackets at home, or the Wild or Utah Hockey Club on the road maybe they’re worth a bet when the numbers don’t suggest they make the cut otherwise.
NHL Betting Guide (Feb. 22-24)
This is the moneyline betting guide for the upcoming week’s games in the NHL. The two columns on the far right are the target moneylines for a bet on either team should you be interested in backing one side or the other. For a better understanding on how moneyline betting works in the NHL, click here.
*Moneyline projections are not built reflecting day-to-day injuries to such meaningful players as: Charlie McAvoy, Nikita Kucherov, and Shea Theodore.
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