A month into 2025–26, underdogs are cashing well above their pregame odds. We looked at every game since October 1st from each team's perspective — both the home and away view of every matchup — and binned the results by pregame win probability.
The underdog uprising
| Pregame Win Prob | Games | Expected | Actual Win Rate | Performance vs. Model |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0–10% | 10 | 5.5% | 40.0% | +632% |
| 10–20% | 22 | 16.9% | 45.5% | +169% |
| 20–30% | 13 | 25.4% | 61.5% | +142% |
| 30–40% | 13 | 36.2% | 53.8% | +49% |
The headline: teams given less than a 40% chance to win are winning exactly half the time — 50% across 58 underdog situations, against a 21.2% average expectation. The longest shots tell the same story. Ten times a team entered at 10% odds or worse; four of them won.
What's driving it
Early-season hockey is noisy. Rosters are still settling, new systems aren't fully installed, and offseason rust lingers. With small samples, one hot goalie or a fluky bounce moves a whole probability bin.
The "model-fair ROI" column — actual wins over expected wins, minus one — isn't a betting signal. It measures how far results have run ahead of expectations, nothing more. The model, trained on years of hockey data, thought these outcomes were unlikely; through a month, they haven't been. A 60%+ win rate from a 25% bin isn't a market inefficiency anyone can bank on — it's early-season variance, and it should regress.
The bottom line
This covers games since October 1st, both home and away perspectives. The early returns look like the Year of the Underdog; the likelier outcome is that things settle as teams find their level. Hockey is random, but not this random. Still — if your team is a heavy underdog tonight, the first month says don't count them out.
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