What Makes a Good NHL Prediction?

For many fans of sport one of its most appealing aspects is its unpredictability. It’s this failure to follow expectations that can make it so very exciting to watch. Big teams can be brought down to earth by lesser ones, players who have shown poor or no form to date can suddenly play a blinder.

But sometimes predictability is exactly what we do want in sport. Nowhere is this more true than when we are betting on the outcome. Even if we’re just watching our team play, we like to be reasonably confident that they’re going to win the games in which they’re the clear favorites.

Sports, unfortunately, are rarely this obliging and some, particularly hockey, are notorious for being unpredictable. Why this should be we will go on to explore in more depth.

However the nub of the matter is that sport is played by people and teams, and they can be unpredictable. Contrast this to the games that you’ll find at all the best online casinos in Canada, pretty much all of these are based on the immutable laws of probability. So, in roulette, there’s a one in 36 chance of the ball landing on a particular number and slots have a similarly random but predictable algorithm programmed into them.

This means that it’s possible to calculate the precise likelihood of something happening, unlike in sport. Of course, it doesn’t mean that you can beat those odds, just that you can pinpoint them.

The variables in hockey

Hockey, on the other hand, is a game that is almost impossible to predict, and there are a number of reasons for this.

Speed and intensity

As anyone who has watched a game will know, there are few sports that are quite as fast moving as hockey. Even another end-to-end game like basketball is played at a less frenetic pace – after all hockey players operate in the near frictionless realm of the ice. This means that fortunes can change in an instant, the true enemy of predictability.

It’s also a game that’s played with an almost super-human intensity with emotions running high. So players inevitably come to blows and, suddenly, a team can find one or more of their members in the sin bin giving the opposition a sudden and unexpected advantage.

Home advantage

Also, possibly more than any other sport, home advantage plays a key role in hockey. Compared with the open stadiums of football and baseball, the enclosed nature of a hockey rink makes for a super-intense atmosphere. So teams in front of their home crowd can get extra-pumped up. For some this can help them to out perform expectations, beating more powerful rivals.

Parity between teams

More powerful is all relative though. In general most of the hockey teams in the NHL are of a comparable level of ability. In other sports this isn’t always the case, especially when one team is particularly better funded than the competition. The salary cap that’s in place in hockey and which is rigidly enforced ensures that no one team can amass a superstar line-up of the very best players.

That’s why there is considerable variance in who has won the Stanley Cup over its history.

Tight results

Last, but not least, while hockey games can be high scoring, more often than not the winning margin can be by a single goal, or a couple at most. The winning goal is also sometimes scored deep into the third period, if not right into extra time. This makes for an exciting finish, but also a very unpredictable game.

Making effective predictions

So that’s the context of how hard it can be to make accurate predictions about the outcome of a hockey game, but what can be done?

Like all sports these days, hockey is awash with data covering the previous form and performances of teams and players. Wrangling all this information is becoming more and more manageable thanks to the increasing use of AI. This can take into account a multitude of factors ranging from head-to-head encounters from the past to individual players’ records against their opponents.

One particular member of a team whose stats can be critical is the goaltender. As the last line of defense it’s his ability to control the scoreline that is arguably the most important.

So any attempt to predict the outcome of a game has to include their data.

There have also been a number of formulae devised with the aim of being able to accurately predict the outcome of any game. So complicated that you would need a good grounding in stats and higher math to understand them, these are definitely not for the typical fan.

So, rather, let’s cling onto and appreciate the unpredictability of hockey for what it is – an essential element of one of the most exciting sports there is on two skates.