Best NHL Teams to Bet After Losses

One popular NHL betting strategy is putting your money on teams to win their next game following a blowout loss. The theory goes that when a group gets embarrassed by an opponent, they’ll give 110% effort in their next match to try and regain respect. The first time I heard of this as a betting strategy was from R.A on the Spittin Chiclets podcast, who informed me that this was a widely known thing in hockey gambling circles. Early in my betting career, I would often make the mistake of betting against a squad that just got their asses kicked, thinking it shows a real talent disparity between the two opponents; only to be disappointed when history failed to repeat itself.

With teams playing more consecutive games in 2021, I did notice these zig zags in results, where I was losing both the zig and the zag. This Blowout-Redemption Theory belongs to the zig zag family of theories along with this notion that players will compete harder to win games following losses (though generally zig zags only happen in consecutive games between the same teams). Testing this requires some data, so I’ll first look to my 2019/20 results, which is a larger sample, to try and find proof for the theorem. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it will correlate to 2021, but we can test that too. For the purposes of this experiment, we’ll define a blowout as 4 or more goals, just to get a greater sample.

Looking at last season’s data, teams are more likely to win the next game after a blowout, but there’s a catch, they’ve got to be a decent team. If their cumulative winning percentage is at least 50%, then they have a 59% of winning the next match and will produce a positive return on betting the moneyline. With $100 bets, you would have wagered $6,300 in 2019/20 and won $7,005. If you are dealing with a below .500 team, then getting blown out does not significantly boost probability of victory in the next contest, winning only 45% of their redemption games.

You might be able to swing a small profit on the marginally bad teams recovering from a blowout, but certainly the bottom feeders don’t receive a performance bonus from getting their asses kicked. There is absolutely evidence to suggest that decent teams are profitable to bet after a rout, however it doesn’t happen terribly often (less that 3% of all total games played to be exact). Given that this phenomenon seems to be common knowledge among experienced gamblers, then surely the sportsbooks set their lines accordingly to reduce the profit margin.

The evidence supports the theory that a bad performance in hockey can lead to a significantly improved performance in the following match, at least the worst performances by good teams leads to improved output in the immediate future. If bad performances can lead to good ones in the future, then the next obvious question becomes; who are the best teams to bet after losses? For this experiment, I decided to look at the raw totals rather than rates of return. When a team that hardly every loses gets defeated, they might win 100% of their next games; however, you’ll have very few opportunities to make that bet. The objective here is identifying the team that also offers the most opportunities to make these bets.

Each bet will be $100 on the moneyline, and were based on games played between Jan 14 and March 14 2021.

The Winnipeg Jets have played 10 games following loses in this time period, and were by far the best team to invest your money on a bounce back. This doesn’t necessarily mean that they had the most wins following loses, but rather they were more profitable. The oddsmakers have not been kind to the Jets the past 2 seasons, often listed as underdogs with higher payouts on victories.

I was expecting both Florida and Winnipeg to be near the top of the list when embarking on this investigation, but the team that surprised me was San Jose. They’ve been a bad team, but not quite as bad as last season. 5 of their 8 wins following losses have been against St. Louis, Colorado, and Minnesota, which are good teams. They’re not simply cleaning up the bottom feeders of their division.

At the other end of the spectrum, the Buffalo Sabres were by far the worst teams to bet after losing, and they didn’t even lose the most games. The Red Wings were bigger losers (maybe not on a % basis), and they were in the middle of the pack for profits following losses. Dallas has been a very streaky team, and mostly in a bad way. Anaheim is simply a team that’s a better wager as loser.

Most of the teams in the southern hemisphere of this list are the teams losing the highest percentage of their games overall, with the exception of Detroit. Nearly all of the Red Wings wins following losses have come against the same opponent who defeated them in the previous game. They’ve also done this against some good teams, like Tampa Bay, Carolina, and Florida twice, (all those games having big payouts betting-wise). Whether they can replicate those stunning upsets going forward remains to be seen, but count me as a skeptic.