How much does scoring first really matter in the NHL?

It is well known that the team scoring first has an advantage. Over the past two regular seasons, 2024-25 and 2025-26, teams that scored first won 66.5 percent of games.

That is the top-line number, but I wanted to go one level deeper. Does team strength, venue, or the timing of the first goal change that advantage? The short answer is yes: all three influence the winning percentage.

Most statistics below cover the previous two regular seasons unless otherwise noted. I will start with league-wide trends and finish with how the Seattle Kraken perform when scoring first. Let’s get into it.

Favorite or underdog?

Three buckets were created: Favorite, Toss-Up, and Underdog. Here is how each bucket was defined:

• Favorite: Points percentage was at least .050 higher than the opponent.
• Toss-Up: The difference in points percentage between the teams was less than .050.
• Underdog: Points percentage was at least .050 lower than the opponent.

Over an 82-game season, a .050 difference in points percentage is equivalent to 8.2 standings points.

Overall, NHL teams that score first win 66.5 percent of games. Favorites, however, win 77.6 percent of games after scoring first. Toss-Up games closely match the overall win percentage, at 66.4 percent compared with 66.5 percent. That means Underdogs are pulling down the overall percentage. They still benefit from scoring first, but their win rate is only 2.9 percentage points above a coin flip.

The second chart looks at teams that scored first but later allowed the opponent to tie the game. The most interesting number to me is the 49.9 percent win rate for the Toss-Up bucket. That suggests the advantage of scoring first is essentially erased once a Toss-Up game is tied. Favorites still push through at a higher rate, while Underdogs struggle once their initial advantage disappears.

Home-ice advantage

A while back, I looked at whether home-ice advantage really exists in the NHL. In that analysis, home teams enjoyed a 5.5 percent boost in standings points compared with their performance on the road. A similar benefit appears when looking at teams that score first. Teams that score first at home win 6.6 percentage points more often than teams that score first on the road.

The same pattern holds after an equalizer. Home teams that score first and later allow the opponent to tie still win 5.1 percentage points more often than road teams in the same situation.

Now let’s combine home and road games with the Favorite, Toss-Up, and Underdog buckets.

The home-ice advantage is clear in every bucket. One interesting result is that Away Underdogs that score first still lose more often than they win. Another takeaway from both Home-versus-Away charts is that Home teams score first more often than Away teams. Even when Away teams score first, their win percentage is lower than that of Home teams scoring first.

When the first goal is scored

Now let’s look at when the first goal is scored and how that impacts the winning percentage.

The trend is clear: the later the first goal is scored, the more likely that team is to win. If a goal is scored in the opening minute, the opponent has 59 minutes to respond.

Keep in mind that the sample size also decreases significantly in each period. The overtime win percentage is 100 percent because the first overtime goal ends the game.

Period Splits with matchup role

The third-period sample sizes get small, but the trend is obvious in the first two periods. So maybe the trick to winning is to score first, but wait a while to do so?

First goal by five-minute increments

Let’s break each period down further into five-minute increments.

There is a lot going on in this chart, so the key is to look at each time bucket independently. The chart shows how many first goals were scored in each bucket. It also shows how often that team won, represented by the blue line, and how often the game was later tied, represented by the red line.

There were too few first goals in the third period to break them into five-minute increments. Because of that, all first goals after 40 minutes were grouped together.

There are several interesting trends. The blue line, representing teams that scored first and won, remains relatively flat until after the 25-minute mark. The red line, representing games that were later tied, also begins declining after 25 minutes. In other words, after the five-minute mark of the second period, the game result becomes harder to change based on which team scored first.

The blue and red lines cross in the 10-to-15-minute bucket. Before the 10-minute mark, games were tied again more often than the team scoring first ultimately won. The overall takeaway is that early first goals are less predictive of the final outcome than late first goals.

First goal vs making the playoffs

Scoring first improves a team’s chances of winning an individual game. Based on that, I wanted to see whether scoring first more frequently also translated into making the playoffs. For this section, we are looking only at data from the 2025-26 season.

Teams in bold on the left made the playoffs. The chart is sorted by the number of times each team scored first. I expected to see playoff teams bunched near the top, but they are spread fairly evenly throughout the chart.

Three teams won fewer than 50 percent of their games when scoring first: the Vancouver Canucks, Toronto Maple Leafs, and Chicago Blackhawks. All three finished in the bottom five of the league. Surprisingly, Chicago tied for eighth in the NHL by scoring first in 45 games.

This shows that simply scoring the first goal is not enough. What matters most is converting that early advantage into wins.

Where the Kraken rank

As you may have noticed in the previous section, the Kraken scored first in 41 games during the 2025-26 season. That is exactly half their games and tied for 16th in the NHL. It is a substantial improvement from 2024-25, when Seattle scored first 35 times and ranked 29th in the league.

Using the .050 winning-percentage difference for the three matchup buckets, the Kraken rarely qualified as a Favorite. Over the past two seasons, Seattle was a Favorite only 11 times and scored first in seven of those games. In the four games when Seattle did not score first, they went 1-3.

When the Kraken were a Favorite or Toss-Up and scored first, they won 22 of 28 games. They struggled as an Underdog, winning only 47.9 percent of the time after scoring first. Holding a lead is one area the Kraken can improve.

Kraken splits with home versus away

Seattle performed markedly better when scoring first at home than on the road. The Kraken were a few percentage points below the league-wide home win rate of 69.6 percent, while their road win rate was well below the 63.0 percent league average.

The Kraken left some points on the table here. Matching the league averages in these situations would be worth about six additional standings points. Holding leads is an area Seattle can improve, but doing so alone would not be enough to push them into playoff contention.

Kraken splits with matchup role

The sample sizes get smaller here, but the trend follows the rest of the league. Seattle is above average in win percentage during Favorite and Toss-Up games, while its overall percentage is dragged down by away games when the Kraken are Underdogs. This feels similar to how the Kraken struggled in the 2024-25 season during the second game of back-to-backs, when they went 0-12.

Does the first goal matter?

Overall, scoring first provides an advantage, but it is not a substitute for playing a full 60 minutes. The 2025-26 data did not show a clear relationship between how frequently a team scored first and whether it made the playoffs.

The 2026 Stanley Cup Final featured the Carolina Hurricanes and Vegas Golden Knights. Carolina ranked fourth in the league by scoring first in 49 games. The three teams ahead of Carolina were tied with 50 games. Vegas ranked 28th, scoring first only 34 times. Two very different paths to the Final.

I think the Kraken will be better than the general consensus expects this season. Even so, they will likely enter plenty of games as Underdogs. The good news is that falling behind is not necessarily decisive. If Seattle can tie the score, the game essentially resets to a 50-50 proposition.

If you have any comments or questions, please leave them below.