The Penguins and Predators, on their respective home rinks, are close to unbeatable. This Stanley Cup Final has played out along that line through five games, with the home team winning each — three for Pittsburgh; two for Nashville. The latest installment was a 6-0 Penguins win on Thursday night, which saw Predators goalie Pekka Rinne pulled for the second time in three road games this series.
The Predators should be confident about forcing a Game 7 — but not winning it
The Stanley Cup Final: home-ice advantage on steroids.
The home team in this Final has outscored the road team, 24-6. Nashville was the stronger team in the first two games in Pittsburgh but couldn’t win, and the Penguins played somewhat well in a 4-1 loss in Tennessee in Game 4. But the home teams have waxed the road teams anyway, and there’s not much time left for that to change.
The Predators are a clear favorite in Game 6, which is back in their Bridgestone Arena. To win $100 on a Predators bet, you’d have to wager something like $140. There’s no reason to think “momentum” from Pittsburgh’s domination on Thursday will carry over, because momentum has died on airplanes for both of these teams all season long.
Hockey is a wild, random game, and predicting the future on a five-game sample size would be malpractice if that sample didn’t so closely match both teams’ histories. When the Pens and Preds are on home ice, they’re both close enough to unbeatable. When they’re on the road, they’re ordinary, even compared to the rest of the league.
These two teams have had really wide home-road splits all year
The Penguins earned 66 home points of a possible 82 in the regular season, tied for the best in the league with Washington. Nashville earned 56, tied for sixth-best. But on the road, the Penguins earned 45 and the Predators 38, 13th and 20th out of the league’s 30 teams. Both teams lost more games than they won away from home. Both teams finished in the top five in the difference between their home and road points. The disparity has only become more dramatic of late.
Setting | Penguins | Predators |
|---|
Nashville’s goal differential in the playoffs at home is 34-15 in 10 games. That’s so good that it feels like a parody to even type it out. But the Predators have been outscored by five goals on the road, where Rinne’s save percentage is .905 compared to .949 at home. And that’s probably the biggest reason to not view the dramatic home-road split as some kind of fluke. Rinne has been a wall in Nashville and a pumpkin in Pittsburgh.
Expect Nashville to win Game 6. Expect Pittsburgh to win Game 7
Anything can happen at any time, and we’re only dealing in probabilities here. I have a muse on my shoulder reminding me of 2009 when the Penguins were the lower seed in a Final that saw the home team win every single game ... until the Pens won Game 7 against the Red Wings in Detroit. The shoe could slip onto the other foot now.
But in a Cup Final between two teams that you’d think are somewhere close to even on a neutral rink, geography has emerged as a defining element. Maybe Sidney Crosby will score a hat trick and the Penguins will win Game 6 in Nashville, and maybe Rinne will stop being such a sieve and win a Game 7 in Pittsburgh. But probably not.
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