📈 How Good Are NHL Predictions, Really?
We don't just make predictions and move on — every one gets written down and checked against what actually happened. Here's the honest scorecard, good or bad.
⬇ Download the full graded history as CSV — don't take our word for it, run your own numbers.
54%
Right about 54 times out of every 100 games this season, based on replaying 1412 real games.
Single games in NHL are genuinely hard to call — historically one of the hardest sports to predict game-by-game, even for the pros. The plainest way to see that: just always picking the home team gets it right 52.3% of the time, and our full season of real analysis only gets us to 54%. We're not going to dress that up as more certain than it is.
🎯 When We Say We're Sure, Are We Actually Right?
The single most honest check of any prediction model: if we say a team has a 70% chance and that's a fair number, they should actually win about 70% of the time we say that — not 50%, not 95%. Below, the bar shows how often the home team actually won when we gave a prediction in that range; the marker shows what we predicted. A bar that reaches its marker means our confidence levels mean what they claim.
40-50% predicted
27.3% actual
50-60% predicted
52.9% actual
60-70% predicted
57.1% actual
Based on replaying 1412 real NHL games this season, only ever using information the model would have actually had before each game.
🆚 Us vs. Vegas vs. ESPN
Every prediction we make is written down before the game happens, then graded once it's over — so this is a real report card, not hindsight. 0 games graded so far, 0 still waiting on a result.
Results last checked 2026-08-03 02:03:09 UTC, across all sports — 0 newly graded that run.
No games have finished yet since we started keeping score — check back once today's games wrap up.
Show the stats behind this
For each prediction we also track how confident we were, not just whether we got the winner right — a model that says "90%" and is wrong should be judged more harshly than one that says "51%" and is wrong. That's what "average error" below measures (lower is better; 0 would be a perfect psychic, 0.25 is what you'd get by always guessing 50/50).
🧪 The Longer History
We also replayed this whole season game-by-game, only ever using information the model would have actually had before each game — a much bigger sample (1412 games) than the live scorecard above, though it's a simulation rather than predictions made in real time.
Show the stats behind this
The sample size behind the calibration chart above, range by range:
| When we said | They actually won | Sample size |
|---|
| 40-50% | 27.3% | 44 games |
| 50-60% | 52.9% | 1319 games |
| 60-70% | 57.1% | 49 games |
"All games" includes stretches early in a season where teams don't have much of a track record yet, which makes predictions noisier. "5+ games of history" filters those out. We don't compare against Vegas here because ESPN's data doesn't keep betting odds around for games that already happened — only the live scorecard above can do that comparison.
All Games
53.3%
1498 games · average error 0.2483
5+ Games of History
53.7%
1412 games · average error 0.2478
🔧 Are We Improving the Model Over Time?
We regularly test small adjustments to the model against games it's never seen, to check if they'd genuinely help. Right now: no — the best alternative we tried looked slightly better, but not by enough to rule out plain luck. So we're deliberately sticking with our original settings rather than chasing noise.
Show the stats behind this
We tested a range of alternate settings against 450 games held back specifically for this check. The best one found: K-factor 12, home advantage 15 (average error 0.2445 vs. our default's 0.2477). We only trust a result like this once it clears a high statistical confidence bar (we require it to be about a 1-in-1000 fluke or better, precisely because we're testing many variations at once and the best-looking one is expected to look good by chance alone sometimes).
Currently Running
K 6
home advantage: 35 pts
Original Default
K 6
home advantage: 35 pts