Home ice has a reputation for helping NHL teams, but the advantage is not equal from one club to another. The completed 2025–26 season gives us a clean way to test it across all seven NHL teams in Canada.
This study compares the home and road records of Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver, focusing on win rates, standings points, goals, overtime, shootouts, travel, crowd effects, and what the numbers mean for home-team betting.
Those seven Canadian teams combined for 138 wins in 287 home games and 121 wins in 287 road games during the 2025–26 regular season. That gives home ice a clear edge overall, but the team-by-team results show why bettors should not treat every home game the same.
What Is Home-Ice Advantage in the NHL?
Home-ice advantage means any benefit a team gains from playing in its own arena instead of on the road. It can come from NHL rules, reduced travel, familiar routines, crowd support, and the ability of the coach to control some matchups.
One of the clearest NHL home-ice advantage rules is the last-change rule. After many stoppages, the visiting team must put its players on the ice first. The home team can then respond with its own line, which gives the coach a chance to choose a better matchup.
The main exception comes after an icing, when the team that iced the puck is generally not allowed to make a normal line change.
How We Measured Home Performance Across Canadian NHL Teams
In our study, we focused on the completed 2025–26 NHL regular season. Each Canadian franchise played 82 games, giving us 41 home games and 41 road games per team. That creates an equal sample for comparing wins, overtime losses, points percentage, goals scored, and goals allowed.
The seven teams produced 287 home games and 287 road games in total. Playoff results are discussed separately because the playoffs use much smaller samples and not every Canadian team qualified.
Win Rate at Home vs Away
How many home games does an NHL team play? For 2025–26, the answer is 41. Each club also played 41 road games, making the home-versus-away comparison even.
The seven Canadian teams won 138 of 287 home games, a 48.1% win rate. On the road, they won 121 of 287, or 42.2%. Together, the seven teams earned about 54.5% of the available points at home, compared with about 48.8% on the road. That gives the Canadian group a home win-rate advantage of almost six percentage points, although individual teams moved in very different directions.
Regular Season vs Playoffs
The regular season gives a much larger sample than the playoffs, so the two should not be measured in the same way. In 2025–26, only Montreal, Ottawa, and Edmonton represented Canada in the postseason, while the regular-season study includes all seven Canadian teams.
In the NHL playoffs, home-ice advantage has a specific meaning because it determines which team gets to host more games in a seven-game series. During the first two rounds, the higher team in the regular-season standings receives home ice. In the Conference Final and Stanley Cup Final, the team with the better regular-season record gets it. The team with home ice can host Games 1, 2, 5, and 7 if all seven games are needed.
That scheduling advantage does not guarantee a series win. Montreal in 2026 are a good example: the Canadiens reached the Eastern Conference Final but lost six of eight home playoff games during their run.
Home-Ice Records of Canadian NHL Franchises
| Team | Home Record | Road Record | Home Win Rate | Road Win Rate | Difference |
| Calgary Flames | 23-13-5 | 11-26-4 | 56.1% | 26.8% | +29.3 pts |
| Toronto Maple Leafs | 18-15-8 | 14-21-6 | 43.9% | 34.1% | +9.8 pts |
| Edmonton Oilers | 22-14-5 | 19-16-6 | 53.7% | 46.3% | +7.3 pts |
| Winnipeg Jets | 19-16-6 | 16-19-6 | 46.3% | 39.0% | +7.3 pts |
| Ottawa Senators | 23-12-6 | 21-15-5 | 56.1% | 51.2% | +4.9 pts |
| Montreal Canadiens | 24-15-2 | 24-9-8 | 58.5% | 58.5% | 0.0 pts |
| Vancouver Canucks | 9-27-5 | 16-22-3 | 22.0% | 39.0% | -17.1 pts |
The table makes one point clear: the home team advantage in NHL games is not the same for every club. Calgary gained a huge lift at home, while Vancouver did the opposite. Montreal recorded the same 24 wins in both settings but earned more standings points on the road because they collected more overtime-loss points.
Which Canadian NHL Team Has the Strongest Home Advantage?
Among Canadian clubs in 2025–26, the answer is the Calgary Flames. Calgary finished 23-13-5 at home but only 11-26-4 on the road. Their home win rate was 56.1%, compared with just 26.8% away. That 29.3-percentage-point gap was easily the largest among the seven Canadian teams. Calgary also earned 51 standings points at home and only 26 on the road.
For the NHL’s best home record among Canadian teams by raw wins, Montreal led with 24 home victories. Calgary, however, had the strongest home-versus-road improvement, showing the clearest difference between how the team performed at home and away.
Which Teams Perform Better on the Road?
Vancouver were the clearest exception to the home-ice pattern in 2025–26. The Canucks won only nine times at home but recorded 16 road wins. Their road win rate was 39.0%, compared with just 22.0% at Rogers Arena.
Montreal also did not show a normal home-win advantage. The Canadiens won 24 games at home and 24 on the road, but they earned 68.3% of the available points on the road, compared with 61.0% at home. The difference came partly from Montreal collecting eight overtime-loss points away from home.
Those cases matter for home-team betting. Playing at home can help, but a bettor still needs to compare the individual club’s home and road trends instead of adding the same home adjustment to every team.
Does Home Ice Lead to More Goals?
For Canada’s seven NHL teams in 2025–26, home ice did come with slightly more scoring. They scored 891 goals in 287 home games, compared with 844 goals in the same number of road games.
That works out to about 3.10 goals per home game and 2.94 on the road, a difference of roughly 0.16 goals per game. The defensive gap was even larger: the seven teams allowed 902 goals at home compared with 980 away. This does not prove that the arena itself caused the difference. Team quality, opponents, injuries, scheduling, and game state also matter. It does show that the 2025–26 Canadian sample performed better overall at home on both wins and goal differential.
How Overtime and Shootouts Affect Home Win Rates
Overtime and shootouts make a simple win-rate comparison less complete because an NHL team still earns one standings point for an overtime or shootout loss. That’s why this study looks at both wins and points percentage.
There is also a small rule-based home benefit. During a regular-season shootout, the home team can choose whether to shoot first or second. The home team’s last-change rights also remain relevant during 3-on-3 overtime.
That does not mean the home team will win the extra period. It only gives the coach choices that the visiting team does not have. The result still depends on the players, goaltending, possession, and the chances created during overtime.
Factors Behind NHL Home-Ice Advantage
The numbers may show a home edge, but no single factor explains all of it. NHL rules, familiar surroundings, less immediate travel, scheduling, and crowds can all play a part. Some are easier to measure than others.
Familiarity With the Arena and Ice
Home players know their own arena, locker-room routine, boards, lighting, and practice setup better than a visiting team. That familiarity may reduce some of the small adjustments that come with arriving at a different building.
The more measurable advantage comes from line matching. Because the visiting team normally commits its players first after a stoppage, the home coach can respond with a preferred matchup. That can be useful when trying to place a checking line against a strong scoring unit or an attacking line against a weaker defensive pair.
Travel and Scheduling
Road teams spend more time moving between cities, changing hotels, and adjusting their routines. The effect can grow when a trip includes long distances or changes in time zones.
A study of 17,088 NHL regular-season games from 2013 to 2020 found that greater travel distance and circadian disruption were associated with worse goal differential. That makes scheduling worth checking, especially for Western Canadian clubs such as Vancouver, Calgary, and Edmonton during long road trips.
Crowd Support
Crowds may contribute to home advantage in a way that goes beyond noise and player motivation. Researchers compared NHL games with normal attendance against games played without spectators during the COVID-19 period.
The study found that visiting teams received significantly more penalties than home teams when crowds were present. That difference disappeared when games were played without spectators.
The researchers described the effect as evidence that social pressure from a home crowd can influence referee decision-making, although the measured effect was small.
Has Home-Ice Advantage Changed Over Time?
Home advantage can move from one season to another. A league-wide study covering 2021–22 through 2023–24 found that NHL teams earned about 58.5% of the available points at home, compared with 52.4% on the road. Our 2025–26 Canadian study showed a smaller gap, with the seven teams earning about 54.5% of the available points at home and 48.8% on the road.
The numbers still point in the same direction, even though they come from different periods. The wider NHL study found a home edge across all 32 teams over several seasons, while our Canadian study found the same pattern across seven teams in 2025–26. Together, they show that home-ice advantage can have an impact, but the size of that edge changes from one team and season to another.
For example, the last NHL team to win the Cup at home was the Florida Panthers in 2025, when they beat Edmonton 5-1 in Game 6 at Amerant Bank Arena. Carolina won the 2026 Cup in Game 6 on the road at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, showing again that home ice is an advantage rather than a requirement.
What Home-Ice Trends Mean in NHL Betting
The combined .545 home points percentage for Canada’s seven teams shows that home ice carried some weight in 2025–26, but it is not a betting system by itself. Home-team betting works better as a team-specific comparison than as a rule that says “always back the home side.”
For example, Calgary’s 56.1% home win rate was more than double their 26.8% road win rate. Vancouver went the other way, winning 39.0% of their road games but only 22.0% at home. Those differences are more useful than one league-wide home number.
For NHL playoff betting, bettors should also know who has home-ice advantage in the NHL playoffs: the higher-ranked team gets the advantage in the first two rounds, while the better regular-season record decides it in the Conference Final and Stanley Cup Final.
The numbers also point to a few useful NHL playoffs betting tips that bettors can keep in mind:
- Compare each team’s home and road record instead of adding the same value to every home side.
- Check the opponent’s road record because a strong home team facing a strong traveller is different from one facing a poor road club.
- Read travel, rest days, injuries, starting goalie news, and scheduling alongside the venue.
- Remember that bookmakers can already build home advantage into the odds, so a stronger home record does not automatically mean a better bet.
Home-ice advantage in the NHL playoffs can give one club four possible home games in a seven-game series, but it cannot decide the result on its own.
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FAQ
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