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Which NHL teams are primed to regress to the mean?

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25.11.2025
We are about 30 percent into the 2025-26 NHL regular season. Thus far, this season has offered numerous surprises, with various teams performing above and below expectations.

However, it is crucial to note that hockey is a sport that can often be significantly impacted by luck and variance, particularly in smaller sample sizes. There are often several teams each year that open with impressive runs until they eventually cool off, while many others rebound from slow starts and finish strong.

The Edmonton Oilers are a prime example of the latter; many should recall their horrendous start to the 2023-24 season where they had an abysmal record of 2-9-1 in their first twelve games. However, they would go on to rally back to finish second in the division in the regular season and come just a single win short of winning the Stanley Cup.

Without the benefit of hindsight, how can one evaluate if a team’s start to the season – good or bad – is truly sustainable? One widely used metric with proven predictive value that we can use is 5‑on‑5 PDO.

This is a statistic that represents the sum of a team’s shooting and save percentage, and is commonly used as a proxy for puck luck. To explain how this stat works in a nutshell, the league average PDO is about ~1.00. Teams with a PDO well above 1.00 are often overachieving, whereas teams with a PDO well below 1.00 are often underachieving. Of course, there are outliers to this rule, as teams with genuinely elite finishing talent and goaltending can consistently score a high PDO (and vice versa), but as a general rule of thumb, the majority of teams will not sustain a PDO significantly higher or lower than 1.00 over a large enough sample.

For instance, the

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