The shootout and the puck line in hockey
Most of what gets said about this is downstream of one detail. A regulation tie is broken by a skills competition, and how a bet settles depends entirely on whether it included overtime.
The puck line is hockey's fixed 1.5-goal handicap, and in hockey it behaves like this: The empty net cuts both ways: it rescues favourites who were winning by one and it buries underdogs who were losing by one.
The league's own contribution: A trailing team pulls its goalie with ninety seconds left, which is the only deliberate act in sport that makes the losing side more likely to concede. It decides an enormous share of puck-line bets.
What follows from that is less comfortable. A 60-minute line and a full-game line are different bets on the same fixture, and they are often displayed next to each other. And on this market in particular: A −1.5 at +110 and a −1.5 at +240 look identical on a bet slip and describe two completely different hockey games.
The archive
What the published price did in the NHL
1,280 games in the NHL that are over and carried a price when we wrote them up, between November 26, 2025 and November 6, 2026. Each count sits beside what it is out of, and the share is the one divided by the other.
| What | How often | Out of | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| The shorter price won | 712 | 1,251 | 56.9% |
| The favourite covered the handicap | 451 | 1,277 | 35.3% |
| The total went over | 652 | 1,277 | 51.1% |
| The home side won | 670 | 1,280 | 52.3% |
- Points in a game, on average
- 6.29
- Winning margin, on average
- 2.25
How wide the games were
Over 1,825 finished games in the NHL with a score — a margin needs no price, so this sample is wider than the one above.
- Half were decided by this or less
- 2
- One in ten by this or more
- 4
- The widest
- 10
How they ended
Over 1,824 finished games in the NHL whose result line says how it ended — the feed's own one-line verdict, not a reading of the play.
| What | How often | Out of | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Went past regulation | 445 | 1,824 | 24.4% |
| Settled on a shootout | 154 | 1,824 | 8.4% |
1 game landed exactly on the number — the handicap or the total — so it is in the count it is out of and in neither result.
The prices counted here are DraftKings', as they stood when we last wrote each game up — one snapshot per game, near kick-off for almost all of them, and never a closing line. So this says what the published line did, not how it moved on the way there.
A season that happened. Nothing here predicts the next game, and none of it is advice.
Counted November 6, 2026.
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